One of my most critical promotions happened during my time in finance. The finance world has a strange way of giving out titles. Drawing from the days when firms were built on a partnership model, there tend to be only a few “public” titles: Associate, Vice President, Managing Director, and Partner. The Vice President title is a critical leap. Achieving it is (or was) a sign that a person has proven herself worthy of building a long-term career at the firm. Therefore, the time it takes you to get a VP title is a strong signal for your future success, and getting the promotion is a complex process that’s done only once a year and run by the senior managers.
My manager explained this to me twice. First, when I got my own VP promotion, he walked me through all of the materials we’d be gathering to support my case. Projects shipped, yes, but also signs of leadership, and work that pushed me beyond my immediate team. The second time I went through this was when I prepared the packet for someone who worked for me. We gathered all sorts of evidence, including the letter the candidate got commending him for being the floor fire warden. Both of these promotions were successful, but I have no doubt that we succeeded at least partially because my boss/mentor knew exactly how to play the game.
If you’re a manager, you are going to play a key role in getting people on your team promoted. Sometimes it will simply be up to you to determine who gets promoted, but more commonly promotions will be reviewed by your management, or a committee. So you’ll not only need to have a good idea about who deserves to be promoted, but you’ll need to make a case for their promotion as well.
What does this process typically look like? Generally, you’ll look at the people on your team a couple of times a year, consider their job level, and ask yourself, are any of these people close to the next level? In the case of the early-career staff, the answer is likely to be yes. These days, people fresh out of college tend to get promoted at least once in their first couple of years on the job, because they’re often hired in at an “up or out” level.
To clarify, take the example of Famous BigCo. Famous BigCo hires engineers out of college at level E2 (level E1 is reserved for interns). Famous BigCo has a policy that an engineer who shows no sign of advancing past level E2 after two years at that level doesn’t have a future at the company. It has this policy for levels E2–E4, but at E5, you can stay forever.
So, if you have a team of E2s and E3s, you need to be preparing them to be promotable every couple of years. Fortunately, this is usually straightforward. As long as you don’t stop them from getting promoted, they’ll be moved forward by the process. Your job with this group is to make sure that they’re learning how to estimate their own work, getting it done roughly within the estimates, and learning from their mistakes. The evidence for promotion often takes the form of projects or features they’ve completed independently, participation in on-call rotations or other support, and engagement in team meetings and team planning.
The important thing for you to start doing now that you’re in management is to learn how the game is played at your company. Every company has its own variation of the promotion process, and you’re probably in this role because you survived it. If you don’t know how it’s done, ask your manager for advice. How are these decisions made? How early do you need to start preparing packets? Are there limits on the number of promotions that can happen in any given year? As you learn how to play the game, I encourage you to be fairly transparent with your team. When members express the desire to be promoted and they don’t have a strong case for promotion, telling them what goes into the process will help them understand what they may need to change.
You should also prepare yourself to start identifying promotion-worthy projects and trying to give those projects to people who are close to promotion. You, as the manager, are in a good position to identify what’s coming up for the team. Depending on how work gets assigned, you may either directly assign these projects to people, or encourage people to volunteer for projects that are a stretch goal for them. Keep an eye out for opportunities for your team members to stretch themselves and grow.
This work does start to change the more senior your team becomes. Many people will not continue to advance past a certain level, at least not within the same company or team. There are fewer opportunities for people to show the kind of leadership or breadth of impact needed to get promoted as they become more senior. Sometimes there is nothing you can do about this, except perhaps to refer them to other leaders in different parts of the company for mentoring or guidance. As much as it might hurt you to lose them, they may be better off in another team or even another company with new challenges.
Many companies expect you to be acting at the next level before you get promoted to it. This practice exists to prevent the “Peter Principle,” in which people are promoted to their level of incompetence. It also signals that there’s room for another person acting at that level on the team. Keep this in mind as you think about your team’s careers. If there is no growth potential on your team because there’s no room for people to work at a more senior level, it may be a sign that you need to rethink the way work is done in order to let individuals take on bigger responsibilities.