When to promote your best people
Hi Everyone,
Lara Hogan, formerly VP of Engineering at Kickstarter, offers a useful standard for promotion:
Promote someone when they are already doing the next job.
In other words, the work changes first. The title catches up later. This protects you from relying on gut feeling, loyalty, or time in the role.
It also helps you avoid promoting your strongest individual contributor into management simply because promotion seems like the only way to recognize them.
Here are five signs that someone is already operating at the next level.
1. The team goes to them first
Pay attention to where the difficult questions end up.
When something is unclear, urgent, or complicated, does the team go to this person before approaching the official manager?
That tells you who people already trust for judgment, context, and direction.
2. Their work has grown beyond their title
Look at what the person is responsible for today compared with what they were hired to do.
They may have taken ownership of a project, process, customer, or part of the team that was never formally assigned to them.
The important part is follow-through. They saw work that needed doing, took responsibility for the outcome, and kept it moving without needing to be chased.
3. They come back with decisions, not just problems
Someone working at the next level does more thinking before they come to you.
By the time you hear about a problem, they have looked at the options and landed on a recommendation.
They still need your approval, but they are no longer asking you to do the thinking for them.
4. Other people want to work with them
Look beyond their immediate team.
- Do other departments ask for this person by name on important projects?
- Do new hires go to them for context?
- Do colleagues trust them to explain decisions, resolve disagreements, or keep work moving across teams?
When the wider company already treats someone as senior, a promotion rarely surprises anyone. It makes the formal structure match the way people already work.
5. They tell you when you're wrong
People at the next level disagree with you in the room.
They tell you when a decision does not make sense, when a priority conflicts with another goal, or when the team is heading towards a problem you have not noticed.
The important part is how they disagree. They bring evidence, explain the consequences, and offer another way forward.
When the answer is no (for now)
A strong performer may still not be ready for the next role.
When that happens, explain what is missing in terms they can act on.
For example:
“You’re doing excellent work in your current role. To be ready for the next one, I need to see you bringing me recommendations instead of unresolved problems and taking ownership of work I have not assigned.”
That gives the person something specific to practice.
Vague feedback such as “you’re almost there” or “keep doing what you’re doing” leaves them guessing. Tell them which behaviors you need to see, where they can show them, and when you will review their progress again.
Promotion into management needs one more test
Your best individual contributor is not automatically the best person to lead other individual contributors.
Doing the work and leading people who do the work are different jobs.
Before promoting someone into management, look for evidence that they can improve the performance of others, not just their own.
A promotion can help retain a strong employee. It can also put them into a role they are not ready to perform.
A new title creates new expectations. When the person hasn't begun developing the skills required for the role, a promotion can quickly replace confidence with pressure.
Try this today
Think of one person on your team who may be ready for a promotion. Run them through the five signs above.
If the role includes managing people, add one more question:
Have they shown that they can make other people better at their jobs?
You don’t need every answer to be a perfect yes. But you should be able to point to repeated evidence that the person is already operating at the next level.
Go deeper
👉 CEPR/VoxEU: Promotions and the Peter Principle — why companies keep promoting their best individual performers into bad management jobs, written up by the researchers who quantified the problem.
👉 Camille Fournier: The Senior Shift — Fournier on what companies look for in promotions and how that differs from what the career ladder doc says.
👉 Lara Hogan's management resources — Hogan's collected essays and free templates on managing people
👉 ADP Research Institute: The Hidden Truth About Promotions — a surprising study showing that people promoted into roles needing little training are nearly six times more likely to quit.
Coming up tomorrow
Tomorrow, we will look at the three most common ways a sales compensation plan stops doing its job.
Thanks for reading!
P.S. Is anyone on your team already passing the five-sign test? Reply and let us know.