With the new year underway, many employees are reflecting on their career growth. And as you consider promotions, it’s important to think about both your team members’ personal aspirations and how you want to evolve your org chart for maximum future success. Your job as a manager is, after all, to develop your team to continuously accomplish bigger goals, and the right timing and approach to promotions can accelerate your collective impact.
71% of employees believe that hiring from within is better for scaling a business than hiring externally, according to a study by Joblist. With your current team members having a much deeper knowledge of your business than new hires, promoting tenured employees into senior roles means less catch-up in company-related areas, since they are building on their existing experience.
That said, promotions must be handled carefully because they affect team morale and employee retention. In fact, 50% of workers said they would look for a new job if they don’t receive their expected promotion, per iCIMS’ 2024 Workforce Report.
So, how do you make the right promotion decisions that will position your team for long-term success?
Identify your big-picture goal
Now is a good time to evaluate, or re-evaluate, where you want your department to be this year, and even over the next few years. Consider documenting what you want to accomplish at these stages and which resources you will need to put into place to realize those goals. Be very specific about the types of outcomes you want and what your ideal org chart might look like. As you do this, think about which of your team members have the right skills or potential to fill those roles. Remember to make this an exploratory stage and don’t come to any conclusions before you do some deeper digging.
Understand desired growth paths
When planning how you want your team to evolve, it’s very important that you check in with each of your employees. Don’t assume you know how a particular team member sees their career trajectory; ask them directly and try to remove any bias or pressure to move in one way or the other. Do your best to find out what drives them and what kind of work really excites them. And remember that not all of your employees will want to or be fit to evolve into managerial roles. So, make it clear that growth can come in all forms and that meaningful career paths can involve deepening skillsets or taking on larger projects over time.
Set clear and measurable benchmarks
When you have career advancement discussions, be sure to set clear goals for each employee to achieve before they move to the next seniority level – and discuss how each of those goals will be measured and quantified. 86% of HR leaders believe that their organizations’ career paths are unclear for employees, according to Gartner, highlighting the existing gap when it comes to this kind of clarity. For this reason, you need to be very consistent about benchmarks to alleviate disparate expectations and feelings of bias or resentment among team members. Find a way to continuously track these goals, whether it’s through work management software or in specific employee documents reviewed in your one-on-ones.
Seek several sources
Success metrics are definitely crucial for promotion intel, but there are also soft skills, interpersonal relationships, and other factors that should inform your decision-making. Be proactive about discovering who is contributing the most to projects. If you’re seeing mentions of the same person in several messaging threads or noticing someone always stepping in to help, be sure to clock that information. Also, keep an eye out for employees who are going above and beyond and showing a work ethic that can be channeled and developed into leadership. Getting this kind of information from all sides will help best inform your approach to team growth and make absolutely sure you’re promoting the right people at the right time.
Recognize team impact
The challenging truth is that not everyone on the team will be promoted, even when they might expect to be. That’s why having clear benchmarks and consistent expectations is key to minimizing the negative feelings that may arise among those who are not advanced during a particular cycle. Make sure you have a strong communication plan in place and that before you announce the promotions on your team, you reiterate your focus on key benchmarks that dictate advancement. Remind your team that some of their goals at their current level might still be in progress, which is why it’s natural for advancement to happen at different stages for different people.
On a similar note, when handled the right way, seeing teammates get promoted can actually spark motivation and build a sense of trust in the process. It demonstrates that the system is fair and based on clear, achievable criteria, encouraging everyone to stay focused on their personal growth.
