Promotions & Career Ladders

A career ladder is most useful long before anyone’s up for promotion — it’s the shared language for what “growing” actually means at each level, and it turns vague ambition into a concrete development plan. Promotion itself is the lagging indicator: it should recognize that someone is already operating at the next level, not gamble that they’ll grow into it after the title change. Getting this right is one of the clearest signals to your team that the system is fair.

When this page is filled in, it’ll cover how to read a ladder with someone so they see the real gap, how to find them the work that builds the next level (and why that’s your job, not theirs alone), the difference between mentorship and sponsorship and why people get stuck without the latter, how to build a promotion packet that holds up in committee, and how to handle the “not yet” with enough clarity that it builds trust instead of burning it. A lot of the level-building work is just sustained coaching; the packet itself is far easier when you’ve kept a running brag list all year. Until then, the Go Deeper links carry the value.