The Insider Guide to Careers
Insider information, secrets and tips about getting hired and building careers. For employees and job candidates.
Every employee dreams about promotions, which is a standard expectation in a company. A manager’s main task is managing the conflict between individual aspirations for promotions and balancing a company’s need to keep the cost structure low.
How companies view promotions:
Companies look at promotions as inverting the pyramidical structure of a company. Every company has a CEO at the top and a considerable number of employees at the entry levels. Promotions disrupt the pyramid shape of the company, especially when attrition rate < promotion rate.
If a company haphazardly promotes employees quickly, the company becomes top-heavy. In this scenario, layoffs become inevitable. Companies use layoffs to bring teams back to their desired size. At the same time, some teams may use quick promotions are a lure to get good talent to join. Typically, these teams may have issues like high stress, ambiguous goals, unrealistic expectations, etc. Promotions and higher pay are used to paper over the more existential team issues. Hence, do your diligence if a team looks too good to be true.
How managers view promotions:
The easiest and laziest way to keep employees happy is to keep giving compensation increases and promotions regularly. The difficult path is to keep employee engagement up by providing challenging work and giving due recognition through year-end bonuses. Unfortunately, many managers are not effective. Their quest for promotions for the team may help the team in the short term but can hurt the company’s long-term interests.
Managers also promote unrealistic expectations from the other team members if some team members get promoted quickly. These actions could quickly dampen team engagement and disrupt team bonding if allowed to go too far.
Promotions are an excellent time to get 360-degree feedback from colleagues of the employee. Ideally, the employee identifies a list of evaluator names (along with the manager) and emails them a link to the online promotion assessment tool. Then, the manager is supposed to collect data, summarize the results, preserve anonymity, and present the results to the employee.
How employees view promotions:
Many employees look at promotions as a way to get higher compensation. However, they need to understand that the chances of failure in a job also increase as you get promoted, as the expectations are much higher with every promotion.
Sometimes, an honest conversation with the manager that you are looking for higher compensation than a promotion can be beneficial. Managers have more control over compensation increases than promotions. To make promotions happen, one needs multiple stakeholder recommendations and approval from the VP/ management chain. Even if everyone agrees, there could be last-minute hassles because of a lack of corporate funding or high competition from other equally qualified employees. On the other hand, departments and companies always have emergency funds hidden somewhere to retain top employees.
One good way to check if one is ready for promotion is to look at the Job Description (JD) for the role one is interested in from the careers website. Then, scroll down to the skills section and ask yourself if you have the skills necessary.
All skills are technical, business, and people related. In addition, communication and leadership skills come under people skills. Most employees are well aware of their technical skill gaps but need to be made aware of other skills gaps, especially in business and people. For example, “lack of executive presence” is a common derailer for senior management roles. It checks whether the manager trusts the employee enough to put the employee before the CEO on a complex topic. However, this trait is vague and can be used to discriminate against minority groups. Hence, managers should be careful with the language used to describe promotion readiness and, if in doubt, should talk to HR.
Employees need to understand that all career paths are unique. For example, just because a peer or colleague got promoted doesn’t mean your time for promotion has come. Therefore, instead of a meaningless discussion about promotion readiness with a manager, a better conversation would be to discuss current skills and how one could better the skills to be ready for a promotion in the future. The more skill-focused the conversation is, the better the action points that emerge. The employee can use the feedback to better themselves.
Ultimately when people better themselves, it is only a matter of time before your company or another company recognizes them. Companies always scout for good talent and are happy to give higher designations to suitable candidates. Sometimes, this path can be the easier path to promotions than slogging in the earlier company, hoping to catch the manager’s notice. The catch is that you need substantial experience in the earlier company to be considered for a more prominent role in another company.
How HR views promotions:
HR always wants to promote top talent, the top 10-15%. For everybody else, promotions are not an answer to solving issues. One option for companies is to offer horizontal growth options to employees rather than just vertical growth. If some employees get exposure to multiple career paths, that could give them the satisfaction they seek without adding to the company’s compensation structure. One example is sending employees abroad on expat assignments. The logic is to help the employee get differential experience and prepare the person for promotion many years later. The catch is that expat assignments tend to be costly.
Secondly, for an employee to get promoted, they should already be doing the job of the position they are applying for. A typical promotion mistake is when the evaluation team looks at present performance as an indicator of future performance. Instead, the manager should give work from the next level to the employee, observe the performance, and give regular feedback.
One trick of managers is giving promotions with a slight compensation increase to keep costs in check. The recommendation from HR is to desist from such promotions, which are in name only. Instead, a significant pay rise should accompany each promotion (at least 10%). Anything less than it leaves a sour aftertaste and may end up decreasing employee engagement rather than encouraging it.
HR and companies need to understand that promotions may not work for all employees. Some employees are better off not getting a promotion. They are either not ambitious or are comfortable with their current role. The only catch is that employees get cost of living increases every year. Over time, a person doing the same job can get a substantial increase in their base salary. It is then easier for the company to hire a youngster who has more fire in the belly and makes more grandiose promises for compensation, much below what the staid employee makes. Such is life. There is no respite from the relentless corporate race.
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