Module summary

The engineers on your team want to advance their careers, and one of the key ways they will do this is through promotion. And while most companies have clear pathways for engineers to travel, the details of assessing when engineers should be promoted can often feel more up to an individual's discretion. So, how do you assess the individuals in your team fairly, creating openness and transparency in an area that can feel difficult to approach for both of you?

Homework and takeaways

Congratulations on completing Module 5 of Nurturing effective engineering teams!  In the module ‘Promoting and progression’ 

You learned:

• Promotion requires thoughtful processes, and there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Based on their own circumstances, companies can take advantage of different approaches to ensure their folks know what it takes to succeed. 
• Defining high performance in your organization requires a lot of intentionalities. By knowing your goals, mission, and culture, you can apply a wide range of tools to provide clarity, identify and encourage top performers, and reduce bias to ensure that everyone is promoted fairly.
• Some tools and frameworks you can use to help ensure you're promoting your high performers appropriately, looking at the characteristics of a successful promotion campaign. 

During your breakout session: You discussed ways you could improve the promotion process and approaches you can take to support top performers. 

You’re now able to:

• Create clarity and alignment around performance and promotion by crafting thoughtful processes that reduce bias, promote the right people at the right time, and identify what’s best for your group or organization. 
• Identify and nurture High Performers by creating a shared definition of high performance at your company to appropriately support your folks and get them to the next level
• Drive an effective promotion campaign - to successfully fast-track an individual's performance. 

Additional resources:

• Watch this talk by Marco Rogers, ‘How to create a career ladder for your software engineering team’. 
• Read this book by Stephen Drotter, Ram Charan, and James L. Noel, ‘The Leadership Pipeline’.