The Promotion Checklist — 8 Pitfalls to Avoid when Growing Your Career
A sneak peek behind the promo process from a Google Exec
Every employee reaches a point in their career when they want a promotion, but only some understand the process behind it.
Throughout my career, I have been through different organizations, from early-stage startups to medium and large companies like Fitbit and Google. Every company has its processes, but there are common approaches that you can take to improve your chances of success.
In this article, I will discuss the promo process, some common pitfalls, and ways to avoid them.
The promo process
The promo process ensures that employees performing at a certain level are rewarded fairly and transparently. Performance is very much tied to business impact because this ultimately delivers value for users and the business.
The more impact you have, the more rewards you should reap.
That’s all there is. Most processes have a specific ladder that describes skills, traits, behaviors, and business impact expected from each level.
Besides the ladder, a process must ensure the same bar applies across the organization. The bigger the organization, the more processes are set in place to ensure fair and equitable outcomes.
I will not discuss what makes a good ladder — maybe I will cover it in a subsequent article — but I will say that maintaining equity is the most important thing.
As a rule: equity builds or destroys trust in an organization and its management, and it must be protected at all costs.
Breaking equity increases organizational risk and organizational distrust.
The manager’s job is to calibrate to a specific bar and maintain it throughout their teams when they help people grow and make promo decisions.
Understanding that there is a ladder and a process will give you a starting point for what to look for. This is also a good point to start evaluating yourself to see where you are.
The 8 Pitfalls to avoid on your path to getting a promotion
During my management journey, I supported hundreds of engineers and managers on their growth journey in startups and medium and large companies.
I was on both sides of the table: as a manager helping people from my teams and as a committee lead, making sure the bar was fairly kept across organizations. I have created engineering ladders in smaller companies and contributed to them in others.
During this time, I have witnessed many complaints and common pitfalls that prevent people on their journey. Some of them I have experienced myself on my growth path.
We will go over the most common ones and hope to shed more light on how to identify them, why they can hold you back, and how to overcome them.
It is your responsibility.
Your manager’s responsibility is to help you grow, but only if you desire to.
There is no such thing that managers “have” to help you get promoted. You need to manifest interest and take ownership of your success; your manager is there to help you achieve it. They can assist you in the process, spot gaps and skills you need to develop, provide valuable feedback, and help you find opportunities.
Some companies require you to grow to a specific level, but mainly to the level where you are independent and don’t take time from somebody else to do your tasks.
Make no mistake — you are in the driver’s seat and you are the one that must put in the work. Your manager is there to help, support, and guide you.
What is the first thing you need to do if you want a promotion? Tell your manager.
You would be surprised how many people avoid this conversation, hoping their manager will read their minds. This approach just delays the time until they reach their goal.
Your manager will not push you to the next level for various reasons that might backfire on you and the company, which I will cover later. On the flip side, if they know that you want a promotion, they will give you feedback on the new skills that need to be developed, consider you for future opportunities, make this one of your main topics for 1:1s, and many more.
So go ahead, talk to your manager. They are there to support and guide you along the way.
Not understanding what is required.
Most people assume that they understand what is required to get to the next level. I urge them to make sure they have a clear understanding of what success looks like. It’s a pity to think you know, work for months or even years, and then find out you had it wrong.
The best person to ask about what being successful at the next level looks like is your manager.
You should also do some more digging on your own.
Reach out to a mentor two levels above you and pick their brains on what skills are required at the next level. Why two levels above? Because they know how to asses complexity and impact at a level below them more easily. They can articulate what is required better than somebody who just got promoted.
I would also reach out to someone who just went through the promo process and ask about their journey. From here, you will get some tips and tricks and will have better realistic expectations.
Ultimately, you will have to understand what new skills you need to develop, what kind of projects you will need to own end-to-end and successfully land, and so on.
When I went for my last promo, I audited the things required at my next level and the projects and initiatives I was leading. The audit showed me a few areas that I was missing.
Based on this, I created a plan to address my gaps with new initiatives. I validated it with my manager and put it into practice. It took a lot of work, but I was ready and got the promotion when the time came.
It takes time & setting realistic expectations.
We all want things to happen fast, and in our current online-connected society, we have even less patience than in the past. Sadly, our lack of patience does not change the fact that to get promoted, we need to demonstrate next-level capabilities.
Depending on the level you are shooting for, this takes time. It may take a junior engineer 1–2 years to advance to the next level, but it may take a staff engineer more than 4 years to get promoted.
How can you figure out how much time it takes on average?
It’s all in the ladder. If the ladder says that for a staff position, you need to land projects coordinating multiple engineers and influencing technical direction for a big group, you can guess that those projects can take 2–3 years to do.
You can speed up the process sometimes, but this will mean a lot of work and stress, and you should be prepared for it. You can parallelize as much as possible and sometimes tackle multiple projects in parallel. It will impact your well-being and work-life balance, so do it carefully.
I experienced this in my accelerated career path, which took me from Junior Engineer to Engineering Director in under 10 years. It was not easy; it was a road of continuous discomfort where every year was different and more challenging than the year before.
Being stuck.
This happens when you know what is required, but your actions do not align with your desire for promotion. You postpone starting projects or engaging in tasks you know are needed for the next level. Most likely, something is holding you back, and you must get to the bottom of it quickly.
It can be something from your childhood, a past trauma, or not knowing what you actually want. At this point, getting you unstuck is outside of your manager’s responsibility and competence.
There are a couple of ways to unblock yourself. You can do it with self-coaching, which is hard, or work with a coach or a therapist.
This happened to me. After Google acquired Fitbit, I wanted to get to the next level, but something held me back, and I couldn’t figure out what. For some time, I knew what was required of me to get promoted, but I was not doing it. I was stuck and coming up with all sorts of excuses.
After some coaching sessions and my complaining about various topics, my coach beautifully reflected my dilemma to me:
“- Look, it looks like you are stuck because you are afraid to try and fail, am I right?”. This uncovered my old limiting belief, which sabotaged me in the past. Yes, they were right. I avoided starting the work because of fear of failure, which is very common.
They continued and provided me with an unblocking frame:
“-What would happen if you put all your energy into this in the next 6 months?
-I would get the promotion, or I would not. Either way, I will be very close to it. The skills I develop will count, so I will get it in the next cycle because I just need to focus on closing the gap.
-Good, now you know what you need to do”.
It sounds trivial and obvious, but it took us a couple of sessions to figure this out. I was blocked and couldn’t understand why. It wasn’t until somebody showed me that my limiting beliefs held me back.
Trying once and giving up.
This is the worst thing that you can do that can set you back: thinking that if you didn’t get it the first time, it does not make sense to try again.
I know it’s frustrating — you put in all that hard work and didn’t get it. I have been there, too. It’s not an easy place to be. When emotions clear out, you need to get back to strategy.
You had a good momentum and you developed new skills in the process. You haven’t fully addressed the full set of requirements, and there are still a few things to finish.
The most important thing that you need to understand is to focus on closing the gap.
Work with your manager on that, and then try again once the gap is closed.
Committees should keep the same goalpost. The validated traits should be considered next time and not re-analyzed. You just need to maintain momentum and close the gap.
Some people consider changing organizations/teams due to frustration and trying again. Remember that you might restart the process, so be mindful of whether that is a smart move.
If the gap can be quickly closed in your current team and with your assignments, do it. Otherwise, you might reset the process or make it even more complicated than it needs to be.
Complaining that there are no available opportunities.
The more senior you are, the more you need to identify or create opportunities for yourself. Sometimes, this is mentioned in the ladder and is a requirement for advancing to the next level.
How do you spot or create opportunities for yourself and your team?
You have to network.
Start hanging out with more senior engineers and product managers. Discover some important issues in the organization that everybody knows, but nobody has time to address. Go to leadership office hours. See what is on their mind and what investments they want to see in the organizations. All of these are good places to start.
You want to find something important that is not currently funded and that is aligned with your growth requirements. Then, make a plan to achieve it. You can take it as a 20% project or change focus entirely.
Sometimes, you just need to take an entire new initiative on top of what you are already doing. It’s not pleasant, but sometimes, it is the only way.
In a palace where everybody wants to work and the shiny new thing, many other opportunities may be more mundane or complicated but will help you develop the next level of skills.
Promotions aren’t given on potential.
As part of the promo committee, I have heard this countless times: “Why don’t we just promote X because they show potential?”
Sadly, potential will not get you promoted; it will just put you on a promo path. Materialized potential will do the trick. This is when you have demonstrated the required skills and business impact at the next level.
The fact that you unblock a project will not get you there; Owning the project entirety, from scoping, developing, and landing, will. That is what materialized potential looks like
Why getting promoted “on potential” is a bad idea for you and the company?
I have seen “generous” managers who promoted people who were not quite there yet.
What happened was that the person couldn’t perform and sustain at the next level; the manager switched from having growth conversations to having performance conversations because now the expectations have increased.
It was a hard time for both the employee and the manager. The new pressure made it hard to work on the gap: it is different to work on closing a gap for a promo than to close the gap on performance at your level. The stress is way more significant.
The whole thing ended with the employee having to leave the company and the company losing a valuable member who was crushing it at the level below but was not performing at their new level.
The sad thing is that this could have been avoided if they had waited a bit more, worked on closing the gap, and not forced the promo.
Expecting that it will be easy.
This is one of those expectations that will backfire.
Once you start your growth journey, you will see things getting harder and harder. That is because you are pushing above your weight and growing. It’s perfectly normal.
Setting an expectation that this will be easy and that everything will be familiar is wrong. Getting to the next level will require developing new skills, meaning you will get outside your comfort zone. This will make it feel uncomfortable as hell.
We are creatures of habit; once we get comfortable, our brains want to keep us safe.
In my experience, if you think things should be easy, once they get hard, and they will, you will feel something is wrong and pause. It can even make you rethink whether you want the promo in the first place.
In my last promo, I expected it to be hard, and that helped me along my journey. Whenever I hit a roadblock, I told myself it was expected and went back to figuring out how to overcome it.
In the past, I set unrealistic expectations for myself, which made me feel guilty when I did not live up to them. It was not enough that I was on a challenging growth path; I was making it even harder for myself.
Don’t expect it to be easy. It will not be. Expect it to be hard, and acknowledge that this is normal, you are growing, and this is what you signed up for in the first place.
When you feel unsure what to do or the pressure mounting up, pause and remind yourself that this is okay. Take a deep breath and then think of what needs to be done. Get out of your emotions and back to your rational self. Doing things will remove the anxiety.
I hope this article helped shed more light on the promotion process and pitfalls you should avoid. Doing so will make you more successful in your journey towards your next level.
In the end, I will let you in on a little secret. There are no shortcuts; the work just needs to get done. In the process, you will develop new skills and become a new person who operates at the next level. Your promotion is just a formal recognition of that fact.
If down your path you applied and missed the first time, don’t give up; you are nearly there. Regroup and try again. You will succeed.
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