How does someone progress in your org? As in, obtain a promotion and then another and another. The classic tale of going from the mail room to the board room only happens if your company has a career ladder for you…a series of levels of title/responsibilities that indicate your growth.
The alternative is to make up titles as you go, declare someone is now “senior” or a “lead” without clear definitions, and eventually start hemorrhaging team members due to the crushing weight of cultural and compensation debt. On the assumption that previous sentence sounds bad, here’s how you avoid it.
For each discipline in your company – we’ll use Engineering as an example, but this goes for Sales and Product and Art and everything else – decide how many levels seem to make sense. How many markedly different plateaus exist between the entry level roles and the VP or C-level roles? A typical non-BigCorp ladder has about six, so let’s begin there. Engineering would start off something like this:
The Everybody Track
Level 1: Associate Engineer
Level 2: Junior Engineer
Level 3: Senior Engineer
After senior you should have two branching paths. The first can certainly be management or leadership. This engineer will help align the work of other engineers. Their continued growth in the org looks like this:
The Management Track
Level 4: Engineering Manager
Level 5: Engineering Director
Level 6: VP of Engineering
This branch exists because not everyone has affinity or ability for leading others. And those people still deserve a way forward in the org. Do not force someone to be responsible for other humans as a condition for promotion. Ask me questions on this if you have them, but you can also just trust me, a former engineer.
The IC (Individual Contributor) Track
Level 4: Principal Engineer
Level 5: Staff Engineer
Level 6: Double Super Deluxe Airbender Engineer (honestly, most of the IC track titles are made up after Senior)
For everyone who wants to keep growing at your company but doesn’t want to be a manager, here’s what the future holds for them.
But What Do These Even Mean?
Here’s what a promotion to the next level in your career ladder should mean.
You now have responsibility for higher level problems. Ostensibly, you received this promotion because you’re reliably demonstrating greater value in your contributions. So now we make it official. You’ve shown you can do more, so now that’s what we expect of you. You shouldn’t just be doing the same thing only more of it, because that’s an invitation for burnout. Instead, you should be tackling issues that have broader impact for the company, for the customers. It shouldn’t be about quantity of tasks, it should be about quality of tasks – as defined by impact.
How do we know what each level entails? This is one of the trickiest parts but here’s some guidance.
For each level, consider 4-5 bullets that indicate measures of success. What can the team member know about their performance that lets them know they’re being successful in their role? These should not be mystical measurements that are only provided once a year when their manager descends from the mountaintop with their performance review. (because you don’t do annual reviews, right?)
I will quickly agree that coming up with these measures of success is hard. You can start by considering things like the size of problems this role can tackle. Do they need to be decomposed for the person, or is the person expected to sort out their own tasks from looking at a bigger issue? Does this person require close or continuous supervision or are they fully autonomous? On a 1-10 scale, how much confidence does this person’s manager have in their work? Are they expected to coach or train others? Are there quotas they’re expected to hit? Tools they’re expected to be able to use with independence?
At this point you know all the levels in your Engineering discipline, you have branches for managers and ICs, you have measures of success that tell you what’s expected of someone’s performance at each level. To move ahead, You still have work to do.
Figure out where your existing engineers fit on the ladder. Classify your Lead Backend Engineer as L4 and your intern-who-was-just-hired-fulltime as L1.
Determine pay bands for your levels. I know you had to bring in some folks early on with wildly misaligned salaries, but putting in the effort to reconcile those now will save you enormous headaches (and staff attrition) later.
And make sure your managers are delivering continuous feedback with regular and frequent 1:1s.
Now everyone knows where they stand, and they know what it takes to get the next promotion.
image courtesy of Scott Trento via unsplash