Career Ladders Won't Get You Promoted

There are other articles out there to guide you how to get promoted quickly. Combing through these sites, you'll find behaviors like: "get clear expectations from your manager", "set goals and hit goals", "be on time", "be challenging, but not dramatic". Nothing inherently wrong with these suggestions, but they're not specific to your job, and therefore, not immediately actionable.

Career Ladders

Career ladders add actionable specifics. They're a tool used by organizations to outline the baseline expected behaviors and qualities of a role, typically divided up by levels within that role. A typical career ladder may have a number categories with behaviors listed in each category. Ex: Technical Ability -- "Senior Engineer writes good code" and "Principal Engineer writes excellent code". All in, you may have as many as 20-30 distinct qualities per level.

Wow! Once I nail all of those qualities, I'll get promoted!

Yeah, that's not how this works. Career ladders are usually only used for preventing promotions.

Leaders Get Promoted

As pointed out in the excellent book "9 Lies About Work", leadership isn't a quality itself. A leader is defined as someone with followers. Well-roundedness will not inspire others to follow you. Inspiring work will.

No one follows another person just because they were so well-rounded. No one should get promoted for it either.

Start by taking stock of your individual strengths. Match those up with what your company needs. What could you do, with your unique passion, that would be highly valued by your company? Avoid low-stakes ticky-tacky stuff. Think BIG.

Write an amazing piece of tech that others use. Give a talk that others attend and learn from. Publish a template for an email that others start using. Refactor a business process to reduce cost and increase velocity. Commit your feature early with crisp quality.

Maybe you've done all that and still haven't gotten promoted, haven't seen your career advance in that very specific way. Well, here's the trick:

Make your boss a follower of yours.

Double it up by gaining her peers and boss as followers.

Be Believable

The other half of the equation is believability. This is where common guidance of "set clear goals" or "understand expectations" advice comes from. Let's say your boss becomes a follower of yours. Great! But she needs confidence that you'll continue down this path. Her recommendation carries weight and she doesn't want to look like a fool if you come up short. This is actually healthy skepticism and is vital to the org.

Believability is someone who has repeatability accomplished a thing and can explain how and why. How many times do you need to do the thing to be believable? Depends on the scope, but the universe points us to the rule of 3. If you do something amazing 3 times and can explain to someone else how and why you did it, you are believable. The more believable you are, the more confidence your followers will have to keep following you, and the more they'll want to push others to follow along.

So, How Should You Use Career Ladders?

If your role has a career ladder, use the description of the next rung as minimum requirements. If a career ladder doesn't exist work with your boss to make one, being clear with her that this just setting the baseline.

The goal here is to know the disqualifying areas. Meeting the baseline criteria won't get you promoted, but not meeting them could prevent promotion. Being toxic at one of the characteristics listed in a career ladder can sink everything. For example, no amount of amazing code will save someone who is an abusive communicator.

Conclusion

To put yourself in the best position to be promoted...

Be a Leader (gain followers)

1. Assess your unique passion and skill. What are you good at? Avoid goals of well-roundedness.
2. What does your company care about? Does the org have a massive blind-spot? Identify overlap of with your passion.
3. As you succeed, pay attention to when others follow your lead. Keep a tally, let it guide you. Invest heavily in a strength area. Make your boss a follower of yours.

Be Believable

1. Explain how and why you're going to do an amazing thing (set goals)
2. Do the amazing thing 3 times

Mind the Career Ladder

1. If you don't have one, work with your manager to create one. Important to lay out any disqualifiers early.
2. Periodically check the career ladder. Work on areas that could block your promotion.