Have you ever wondered what the company was thinking when they decided to promote someone, or in some cases to withhold a promotion (hopefully not yours) for another year?
Here are some of the reasons we’ve come across that proved to be influencing the company’s decision.
Business direction
It may sound a bit cruel, but major part of the promotion decision is not about you, but what the business needs. The short to medium direction of the company determines what strategy, organizational structure and projects would be required. These in turn decides what positions are needed, creating the opportunity to upgrade certain positions or upward-transfer someone.
Budget
Let’s be practical, promotion is tied with a salary increase. Whether or not the company is on a tight budget would certainly affect how many promotions they allow in the new financial year. Let’s face it, promoting someone with an insignificant increase in salary would certainly send a message so much worse than simply offering a usual annual salary increment.
Bear in mind that both business direction and budget are significantly influenced by the economic outlook. For example, COVID-19 has hit the economy drastically in the sense that for some industries, one is lucky enough to have kept his or her jobs. In such cases, it might be impractical to expect a promotion.
Your value to the company
What unique values do you bring to the company? This is tricky because sometimes, a consistently solid performance does not mean contributing strong values to the company.
Your value is much more than your current performance. It is affected by many factors - how your unique personality would entail your leadership, how your potentials could lead to future performance, whether or not you have demonstrated the ability to perform at a higher level.
Uniqueness of your value is also another big piece. It involves the assessment of your flight risk and the consideration of how easy it is to find someone in the market who could deliver similar values to yours.
Needless to say, the more unique and the higher your values are, the more likely it is for the company to consider you for a promotion.
Your peers
That’s right, your peers play a role too. Not in the sense that they have a say in the decision-making process (at least not the case for most companies), but the company would definitely consider how your peers would react when you are promoted to a more senior role. It’s not likely to be a deal-breaker, yet it would be one of the factors taken into consideration.
It seems that most of the factors above are beyond our control. It’s true - an employee is indeed in a relatively passive role at this matter. Yet, there are still certain things one could do to attempt at influencing the decision and we would discuss more about that in our next article.
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