Growth, promotion & management
By: Steven Van Rappard
Tags: Performance Management, Management, Engineering Mangement, Career Advancement, Promotion

How should we see the managers responsibility towards employee growth and promotion?

Should everyone grow?

Some people are ambitious, alway looking for opportunities to increase their impact. And some are not. The ones that are, will push their manager to help them grow. But the ones that are not, should there be growth for them? Maybe they are perfectly happy in their role. They like their colleagues, their projects, they get by fine on the money they make.

It’s hard to stand still, even in a place you like. Our work environment changes quickly. The place where someone was thriving will evolve and expose them to new demands. This continuous change of our work environment makes continuous personal development necessary.

Setting goals, moving towards them, failing, learning; these are things we need to stay engaged, regardless if they lead to promotion. Most people are eager to learn and develop themselves. Having a manager that supports them with their development increases their trust in that manager and improves their sense of belonging to the company.

We should respect people’s choice if they are happy where they are. But we should still help them find growth opportunities. Even if it is just to help them stay where they are.

Growth and Objectives

At the start of their career people tend to focus on what they aim to work on, rather than on what results they want to achieve. It’s easy to be busy. Work finds people, especially the high performers. For them the problem quickly becomes what to focus on. Ideally those priorities are at the intersection of business and personal goals.

Formulating objectives in terms of goals to achieve, rather than activities to do, helps development by triggering self reflection. Consider the difference between these statements: I will help the team optimize service A. Versus: I will reduce the latency of service A by 20%. The second objective will feel uncomfortable to commit to. How do you know beforehand what improvement you can achieve? What if the team’s priorities change? But the second objective also allows you to look back at the end of the period and reflect, while the first one does not. What was the result of your effort? Were you ambitious enough? What options did you explore to get to a result?

This personal cycle of planning, doing and reflecting is similar to the mechanism that drives continuous improvement in Agile teams.

Promotion as a goal

When asked about their goals many employees automatically identify promotion as their first objective. That’s fine. It’s a good starting point for a conversation about growth.

A promotion has value because of what it represents to the employee. This will differ per person: it can mean more money, recognition, new challenges, the chance to brag to their connections on LinkedIn, just to name a few.

It may take some prodding to get to this root, because culturally many people are reluctant to admit that, for example, money or status are important to them. As managers we need to respect the goals of our reports, but we’ll need to figure out what those goals are first.

Regardless if someone is ready to be promoted it is worth it to figure out why they want the promotion in the first place. What are they hoping to get out of it? Is it realistic? And is the role they are after the best way to achieve it?

Promotion and self reflection

A key problem with promotion is that it is hard to assess your own readiness for the next role. Why is this so though? We work with very intelligent people. And the ones considering promotion are usually the high performers. I think the main difficulty is in finding the right perspective.

If self reflection is a mirror it is one that by default shows you in your current position. From that perspective it may be clear that you have started to outgrow your current role, but that does not always mean that you are ready for the next one.

To get a view of that, the perspective needs to be changed, which is hard to do.

In a similar way our view of the next role tends to be based on the perspective of our current role. You may know the aspects of the next career level that touch your own, but miss those that do not. Just to give an example: if you are a first line manager you probably know that your manager is your support channel, but are you aware of the stakeholder management they do behind the scenes?

To acquire a new perspective takes effort. Reviewing the job description. Looking for feedback. Talking to people that do the next job. Getting a mentor. Taking on some tasks that belong to the next career level. As the new perspective is gradually acquired it becomes easier for the employee to assess their readiness.

Managers need to be aware of this problem; the expectations of their high performers have to be managed early on. If there is a mismatch in the managers and the employees assessment of promotion readiness this needs to be addressed early.

The managers responsibility

So what is the manager’s responsibility in all this? Is it their job to get their reports promoted?

To stay engaged and in touch with the work environment continuous growth is necessary. The manager can support this growth by coaching the employee to find and work towards meaningful objectives. This should be seen broadly and not just in the narrow framework of promotion. The goal is growth and engagement and promotion may be a side effect.

If it is established that promotion is the right goal, it is the manager’s responsibility to help the employees understand where they are with regards to the competencies that are required and by coaching them on those. What can be achieved is up to the employee.

Promotion bugs

From what I have seen I think these are the most common reasons for misalignment on promotion expectations.

The employee feels they are ready for promotion because they perform at the next career level on some aspects of their role (typically craft), but they do not perform at that next level on other aspects.

Help them understand the full requirement for the next role. Coach them to reflect on the aspects where they are not ready.

The employee expects to be nominated for promotion because they exceed expectations in their current position, but they do not yet perform at the required level for the next one.

Help them understand the full requirement for the next role. Delegate some tasks that expose them to responsibilities of the next career level.

The employee has identified promotion as their goal but seems uninterested in the problem space of the next career level.

Have a further conversation about personal goals. Try to find what is at the root of the desire to be promoted. Are there other ways these goals can be achieved?

The employee feels they cannot get promoted because their manager does not believe in them.

If someone is not convinced of their manager’s objectivity and good intentions it will be a serious hindrance for coaching. Besides working on the trust relation the manager should help find a mentor that their report trusts that can give their opinion on promotion readiness.

The employee wants to be promoted but does not put in the effort to understand the requirements for the next role.

As long as someone thinks promotion is something they will receive and do not understand it is something that they need to achieve it will be hard for them to make progress. Coach them to understand that promotion is not just a reward for good performance. They are in charge of their own growth path. The manager is there to help them forward, but not to push them there.

In Summary

It is key that the employee starts to understand their own readiness towards promotion, in the long run this contributes much more to their growth than their manager’s opinion.