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Promoting Your Report

There are two factors for managers to consider when thinking about promoting a teammate:

  1. Individual performance.
  2. Business needs.

Individual Performance

Every job at 37signals has a career progression framework which outlines the competencies needed to progress from a Junior contributor (L1) all the way through Principal (L5). Some jobs have a portion of that framework (e.g. L2-L3) when the entire 5-step continuum hasn’t been needed yet.

When considering promoting someone on your team, first assess their performance against their progression framework. Consider the following questions:

  1. Are they exceeding expectations in all categories of their current level, and meeting expectations in the level to which you'd like to promote them? They don't need to exceed the promotion level in all categories, but they should be reliably performing in most next-level competency areas.
  2. Can you point to work that illustrates how they exceed performance expectations? For example, a Senior Programmer is expected to be capable of devising new patterns and conventions within existing code bases and in greenfield development. Show your report's body of work where they've demonstrated successful application of that Skill.
  3. Has your report been exceeding performance expectations for a sustained period of time? It's great when people start to perform above their level, but give it some time to ensure their promotion is conferred only when their performance is reliably solid at the next step up. Usually 6-12 months is enough time.

Granting a promotion isn't entirely about ticking off the boxes of the rubric. If you can go down the list of Skills, Engagement, and Coachability requirements and say confidently that your report is performing well at their next level, then consider the following:

  1. What does your instinct tell you about your report's ability to succeed at the next level? Do they take the initiative on exploring new work? Do they see that work through and retain ownership? Is their focus and follow-through consistent and reliable? Do you trust their decision making abilities? If they were suddenly without your oversight, would the quality of their work be acceptable?
  2. How confident are you in your assessment? If pressed, would you be able to (and want to) defend your decision to promote? Are you not just confident, but enthusiastic about your assessment - "hell yeah"?
  3. Are you being objective? That is, as objective as you can be. The progression frameworks are written in plain language. You should be able to stand your report's performance against their rubric and see clearly whether or not it hits the right marks. Avoid trying to interpret the language in the rubric to fit a level-up, or fluffing up your report's work to meet the mark because you want them to succeed. It's a nice impulse! But ultimately unhelpful to team dynamics and cohesion.

Leveraging AI When Considering Promotion

AI can help with promotion decisions when used to clarify (not replace) manager judgment. Ask AI to "find the diff” between your report's current and next-level expectations (e.g. L2 → L3), and translate our job descriptions into a concise set of implied promotion criteria. Leveraging AI like this helps managers focus on what's changed between levels rather than over-indexing on recent performance or on patternless signals. It also provides a lens to review your notes from over the months, improving consistency and mitigating implicit biases.

AI output should be used to support assessment work you've already done and not as a checklist or bar for promotion readiness. Validating your work with AI allows you to more efficiently spend your time parsing the ambiguity of our framework language and considering the inconsistencies in our assessment language. Our assessment frameworks and language are unavoidably nuanced and subjective; in fact, they're intentionally so, and something we cannot lose to AI processing. AI can help managers base promotion considerations firmly in their report's behaviors, while reserving their human judgment and context for final decisions.

Business Needs

Strong individual performance is necessary for a promotion, but it's not enough. After establishing that your report is operating at the next level, ask yourself whether promoting them also serves a business need.

In general, we promote employees for a couple reasons:

  1. To recognize & reward high performance.
  2. To increase engagement and retention.
  3. To advance the needs of the company.

At 37signals, promotions carry some extra weight because we don’t give merit raises or incentive pay. That makes promotion our primary mechanism for rewarding excellent performance. As a result, it’s easy to default to thinking of promotions as solely recognition tools when they are also structural decisions.

You should be able to answer some questions when building your case for promotion:

  • Will another [level/title] improve how the team operates? Are we over-leveling relative to the actual work to be done?
  • Why is promotion the right solution? Could we make a different change that gets to the same benefit a promotion would bring, e.g. adjustingn project assignments or pulling from another team?
  • What happens if we don’t promote? Is there a downside to keeping things as-is?

If you can’t reasonably project your promotion case resulting in positive changes to outcomes, ownership, and capability, pause and reassess.

Promotion Process

Once you're confident your report meets the criteria for promotion, write a pitch for promotion and share it with People Ops. Make sure you hit the following points:

  • Exceeds expectations in all current level categories with work samples.
  • Meets expectations in most next level categories with work samples.
  • Narrative assessment of your report's work, skill level, engagement, attitude, and coachability, with examples.
  • The business case for promotion.

You can and should communicate often, and in detail, with your report about what steps they need to take to be promoted. But refrain from promising anything on any sort of timeline. As described above here, we don't use checklists or schedules for promotions and raises, there's more to it than that. Share your experience with your report, be generous with your feedback and your candid impressions of where you see opportunities for advancement and improvement, without committing to a promotion until final approval.