Understanding Where Promotions Come From In Your Org

There is an incomplete truth at the heart of most performance review processes: that you get rewarded with a promotion when you make your customers more successful. 

In the tech industry, this connection between the actions you take and the benefits that accrue to customers is called “impact.” As in, “I had huge impact this quarter when I shipped that new feature.”

But in medium and large organizations, this relationship breaks down. If you work on a team that builds release infrastructure for a big company, it’s essentially impossible to draw a causal relationship between the work that you do and the success of your customers. Customers might notice when a release goes wrong, but it’s very hard to quantify the effect of a release occurring 5% faster on a customer’s purchasing decisions.

Since managers still want to reward high achievers and those high achievers want promotions for their work, something other than customer success must be used.

Small Orgs Can Promote on Results

When a team is small, it’s sometimes possible to measure individual performance. In this phase, the connection between a person’s actions and customer success can at least occasionally be said to be causal. 

Maybe a key customer mentioned the feature you just shipped as a reason for them signing up for the product. Or maybe the conversion events from an ad campaign that you ran led to a measurable uptick in profit this quarter.

When the team is small and everyone knows approximately what everyone else is doing, cause and effect are more closely linked. In this environment, you can get promoted on the basis of results. If you’re really good at your job, you can reap outsize rewards and build a reputation for excellence.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that just because the organization can measure and reward success that it will actually do it. Maybe your boss is a jerk or the owner of the company has already decided to promote their nephew to run your team. In either of these cases, you are unlikely to get promoted just by  delivering superior results. But at least it was hypothetically possible! 

Large Orgs Frequently Rely on Patronage

In large organizations, measuring performance is borderline impossible. So, large organizations rely on different sources of signal about promotion readiness. The most common pattern I’ve observed is simple patronage. This both makes a lot of sense and is deeply discouraging.

Even if you’re unfamiliar with the term, you’ve probably experienced patronage at work. It’s when a person or organization bestows an endorsement or encouragement upon another person. 

To be clear, patronage is not illegal. It’s not even particularly unsavory in some contexts. When the president of the United States is elected, he or she gets to choose their cabinet of advisors. Most people accept this patronage system as an efficient way to create a government.

On the flipside, if you’ve ever worked on a team where your boss has an obvious favorite, you’ve probably experienced the darker side of patronage. This practice is inextricably linked with all the isms of the modern world because the people in power tend to form relationships and show preference for the people most like them.

Learning From Example

So with this context, how do you figure out where promotions come from?

Look around your org and find people who have been recently promoted as well as managers who have recently promoted members of their team. Ask them about those decisions and start constructing a data set not about what the HR handbook says about promotion, but what is actually happening.

Did two managers describe promoting on the basis of personality traits? That’s a strong signal that people are being promoted on the basis of patronage. 

Does your org share promotion packages or specific business result benchmarks? That’s a strong signal that you’re working in a results-driven organization. 

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to getting a promotion, especially as you become more senior in your career. But you can increase your odds by being clear-eyed about what is actually driving promotion decisions with current managers and then optimize for the things they care about.

What’s Next?

I think it’s really important to understand the way the world actually works, not just the way people tell me it works. In this way, I think understanding results vs patronage promotion is a valuable framework, but ultimately it boils down to gathering the data about how your peers are getting their promotions and how best to position yourself to ride that way.