Career ladder is one of the best tools to align individual growth with the business growth:
It clarifies the promotion criteria transparently and advocates meritocracy
It reduces churn by challenging long term employees
It sets examples of good behavior and inspires leadership
It ties compensation to impact as the business sees it
Unfortunately many companies fail to take full advantage of this tool. Let’s visualize some of the common mistakes.
Hidden
The tool is there but it fails to serve most employees
Vague criteria
Frustrating to navigate: people are often misplaced (or so it seems)
Too few steps
Does not support gradual growth, employees get stuck on the same step (often the step they started at)
Too short
Puts a hard cap on the growth and demotivates employees
Not connected to compensation
Acknowledges going above and beyond but fails to compensate the extra effort
Glass ceiling
Has non-obvious (often unfair) rules for how far one can go up
Discriminatory
Lifts some with minimum effort (particularly those who resembles the promoters)
Favors shouters
Promotes shouting. Fails to set an example of those who just do their job.
Forces lane change
Forces the employees to change teams or type of responsibilities to climb up
Constant reorg
Some end up holding tight. Others keep jumping between irrelevant positions.
Bureaucratic promotion
There is so much process around promotion that hardly anyone climbs
Pyramid
Set up to intentionally make it harder and more cumbersome to grow. Therefore the majority of the employees are at the lower levels and the culture they build eats the strategy for breakfast!
Low bar
When the business itself doesn’t have the capacity of growth, any effort put into growth may lead the employees to become “too good” and leave
Unused
Not part of evaluation process or development talk
Absent
Screams “growth is not supported here”! (lack of growth mindset at the leadership level)
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