Promotions Should Be About Behavior and not Talent

I just participated in the promotions process with my current company. It’s always an interesting cycle of identifying individuals that are ready for promotion, documenting what they’ve done to prepare themselves, and then articulating a rationale for promotion.

It’s my experience that many companies do a good job of identifying people, a not great job of documenting their readiness for a new roll, and a bad job of articulating what that promotion will mean in practical terms.

To a certain extent, my current company does a better job than most, but still falls down on that latter bit. People are promoted due to what they are already bringing to the job but not quite what expectations we will be saddling them with following the promotion.

This is a huge miss organizationally. It’s a failure of management and of the company to define these roles in meaningful ways. I know individuals that are performing at a high level in their current role and want to be promoted to the next level but have no idea what that next level requires. It would be unfair to promote a high performing individual into a position in which they would be a low performer based on the rubrics and expectations.

Here, we need to acknowledge that each stage of professional growth has different expectations for job performance. It’s not enough to be “senior” and merely know your platform very well. You might be an expert at Android or iOS development, but the company rubrics involve soft skills like mentoring or effective team communication.

Some people are truly exceptional at the level of individual contribution. But they don’t contribute to the team effort. That’s a sincere disappointment. It’s really annoying to have someone that’s obviously talented but the net effect that they have on a team is far less than the sum of the parts. Sometimes, they actively bring down the team velocity.

Raw programming talent is worth so much less than people assume. It’s helpful, but not in isolation. One must be able to contribute to team health as the senior levels as well as product health.

It’s this specific thing that I think often gets lost in promotional considerations. I’m far less invested in whether someone is a programming prodigy than what they’re able to do to grow their teams. There’s a whole narrative for promotion on how someone has grown technically but also socially.

We should be exploring that holistic narrative. A lot of conversations that I’m in involve how much someone has done for a project or how they’ve handled technical problems. That’s great! But I don’t care. Any individual might have been able to step in and figure out the issue if they had been charged with the task.

What I’m looking for is whether an individual grew their knowledge. I want to promote people that aren’t only smart and can get things done. There are a lot of those in the world. I want to promote people who can do that while also digging pits of success for the team. I want to see people think holistically about making things better for everyone and doing so repeatedly.

Being smart and getting things done is a base requirement for many senior roles. I’m not impressed by senior engineers that know their stuff. That’s expected. I’m not impressed by senior engineers that know a lot of stuff. I expect that, too. I’m impressed by senior engineers that can share their knowledge with the staff and make an entire team better just by their presence on that team. That’s a behavioral characteristic of an individual that’s motivated highly by team growth, product improvement, and process polish.

I don’t want to work with people that only want to figure out how to grow themselves. We can do that, but it’s uninteresting and non-multiplicative. I don’t want to promote people who just want to be paid more to be more of themselves. I want to promote people who want to be paid more to make their teams more. You can’t improve the group without improving yourself, but the mindset and the expectation are important.

I want to promote people who promote others, not themselves. I want to promote people who continually demonstrate team leadership, not people who want to show everyone else how much they know.