a culture of internal promotion

The smart, ambitious, dedicated people you want to have on your team are also very often the kind of people who are really interested in paths to advance within the organization. They want to do the kind of work that gets people promoted. They want promotions. For some, even many, of these folks, their upward trajectory at the organization matters as much or more to them as the number on their paycheck.

But what if your organization is quite small? Or you’ve got leadership roles that have been filled for a long time with great people who have no intention to leave? What if you lead a team within a pre-existing bureaucracy where salary bands, titles, and roles are tightly regulated? In other words, what do you do if you can’t reward your people with the traditional trappings of a promotion (new role, new title, and a raise)?

The culture is always something you can control as a leader. Whatever is true of your HR policies, you as the leader run a distinct, parallel economy within the organization. Your values, your acknowledgement, and your attention all create incentives for the other people on your team. Whether you have the cash or clout to offer old-school promotions or not, you can build a culture where people draw energy and satisfaction from promoting themselves.

The culture you build can value people who grow within their roles and take on more and more within their roles. Eric and I have both led award-winning workplaces where employees touted the culture and recruited friends and family, even though the number of traditional promotions available were few. The folks we tried to hire and reward were ones who found growth profoundly satisfying, whether there were extrinsic benefits like bigger salary and weightier title on the other side.

When I've witnessed an excellent cultural leader in action, I actually don’t see that much of the leader. What I see in motion is a value system that helps people value parts of themselves they previously didn't and build skills and a record of accomplishment they might not have thought to aspire to without it.

Leaders can establish a system like this with relative ease, through clear definitions of what is valued and clear acknowledgements of even the smallest instances of those values in practice. 

-ben