Promotion and Advancement

Questions and model answers

1. If you were offered a more senior role, what would you want to know first?

   What I'd be giving up. Every senior role I've watched involves less of the actual work and more of the arranging of it, and that trade is either fine or unbearable depending entirely on the person. So my first question is what a normal Wednesday looks like, not what the title is. The second is who I'd be responsible for, because managing people is a different job with the same employer, and plenty of people accept it without noticing they've changed careers. Money would be about fourth. Not because it doesn't matter, but because a raise that comes with work I dislike is the most expensive money there is. I'd rather keep the job I've got than trade my Wednesdays for a better title.

2. Is it better to ask for a promotion, or wait until you're offered one?

   Ask, and the reason isn't confidence — it's that waiting assumes somebody is tracking your case, and usually nobody is. Not out of malice; the person who would advocate for you has forty other things and no reminder that you exist as a decision. Asking is mostly supplying that reminder. The version that works isn't demanding a title either. It's asking what would need to be true for it to happen, which gets you a real answer even when the answer is no, and turns a vague hope into a list. The people I've seen wait longest are usually the ones doing the most work, because they assume the work is visible. It isn't, particularly. Asking once is cheaper than guessing for another year.

3. Tell me about a time someone else got something you had hoped for.

   A team lead role at a place I'd been at longer than the person who got it. My first reaction was that it was about the two of us, and it took me a while to notice it wasn't. He'd been running the standups for four months. I'd been doing more work than him and none of it in front of anyone who decided. What made it useful rather than just bitter was that my manager was honest when I asked. She said, roughly, that she couldn't picture me doing the job because she'd never seen me do any part of it. That was fair. I'd been waiting to be given the role before behaving like it, which is the wrong order.

4. Should promotions be based purely on performance?

   Not just on how well someone does the current job, no. Being great at one thing doesn't tell you much about whether you'd be good at a different one, and a promotion is nearly always a different job. Everyone has seen the best person on a team turn into a bad manager, usually because what made them good was doing the work themselves. So I'd use performance to decide who gets a go at it, because that part is at least fair. Then let people move back if it isn't working, and treat that as normal rather than a failure. Most places won't do that, so they keep moving people into work they don't like and calling it a reward.

The Korean translation, the expression breakdowns, the reusable frames and the common-mistake notes for these four questions are in the book. The recording and this transcript are free, here and on YouTube.