On Your Own Terms

What’s the best way to get promoted in the new world of hybrid working?

A thread.

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Default management answer: “Nothing’s changed.  Stay focused on delivery, delivery, delivery!  Because the same stuff that got you paid and promoted pre-pandemic will get you paid and promoted today. Now shoo!”

Wildly unsatisfying… 1) because most people didn’t know the rules pre-pandemic so how can they know now?  And 2) because we’re all asking the question hoping that the rules we never understood have changed.

They haven’t. 

And they’ll remain complex and fluid and opaque until we make some principled changes.

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Some quick modeling of our common experience: 

Imagine that you join a company at skill-level 1, output-level 1, and salary-level 1.  Over time, the company invests in you (and/or you improve through experience) and you level up to skill-level 2 and/or output-level 2.

If life were a video game, the system would exclaim “Wow, good job!  Let’s level up your salary to level 2!”  After a couple more levels, you’d fight the office-bully mini-boss and BAM: “Welcome to management!”

But life isn’t a video game.

Games operate with information symmetry– where all relevant data are known to all parties involved.  Life on the other hand is all about information asymmetry… which is even more acute in business because managers are ill equipped to assess employee skills and output levels. The best they can do is to evaluate you in comparison to your peers.

Hence the cross-industry practice of peer-relative reviews.

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The other way that real life differs from SimWork is that salary-level 2 demands that your responsibilities grow.

The word promotion has come to mean doing a larger job, sitting in a larger seat.  It does not mean doing the same job (better) for more money.

It should.  But it doesn’t.

Hence the industry-wide practice of jumping laterally every 3 years– tragically resetting your social capital score back to zero, losing the only lasting benefit of your work life (your friends)... and all for a measly bump in pay and some ceremonial title change.

[Sad trombone: wah wah wah.]

[Accompanied by a tiny violin that plays for the company– penny wise pound foolish.]

[Because we all lost.] 

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We tend to confuse our need to get promoted (to own and do more) with our intuitive sense that we deserve more (for what we already do).

[That intuition is right by the way.  You *do* deserve more. But that confusion might have us all asking the wrong questions.]

Maybe the right question to ask is how to shape our institutions to give employees their equitable right; how to expose employee skill and output data through transparent systems and processes that advance information symmetry; and how to pair that data with purposeful learning opportunities that lead to real, meaningful growth. 

So people can own how they level up.

Because the best way to get promoted in the new world of hybrid working is to do it on your own terms.