The problem wasn’t promotions. It was how we decided them.

For years, promotions in our company happened the way they do in many businesses.

Someone had been here for a few years. They were doing a good job. Their manager suggested they were ready for more. We’d sit down, talk through the pros and cons, and decide whether it was time for a new title and a raise.

At the time, it felt like a reasonable way to handle things.

Looking back, I realized we had built a process around opinions instead of standards.

Every promotion was different because every conversation was different. One manager valued initiative. Another emphasized technical ability. Someone else rewarded loyalty or tenure. None of those things are inherently bad, but they created a problem we didn’t fully appreciate until the company grew larger.

We weren’t promoting people based on a system.

We were making it up as we went.

You may feel like you’re in the same position today.

If every promotion requires a lengthy discussion, if different managers would give different answers about what it takes to reach the next level, or if employees aren’t entirely sure what’s expected of them, you probably don’t have a promotion process.

That realization forced us to rethink how we approached career growth.

Our first instinct was to define promotion criteria across the entire company. The more we thought about it, the more we realized that wasn’t the answer either. I shouldn’t be the person deciding what separates a Level II SEO Specialist from a Level III SEO Specialist. I shouldn’t define what distinguishes a senior project manager from a project manager.

The people leading those departments know how to evaluate the technical ability of people in their department much better than I do.

For that reason, it’s now their responsibility to define it. It’s my responsibility to make sure every department defines it the same way.

This understanding became the foundation of our new career path framework.

Every department now follows the same structure. Each level must define increased responsibility, greater autonomy, higher expectations, measurable performance, stronger decision-making, and the competencies required to operate at that level. The actual skills are different for every department, but the philosophy behind advancement is identical.

That consistency is changing conversations about promotions.

Instead of asking whether someone feels ready for a promotion, we ask whether they’ve already demonstrated the expectations needed for the next level.

Those are two very different questions. One is based on opinion. The other is based on evidence.

A mistake we made early on was allowing promotions to become rewards. Someone worked hard. Or maybe they’d been loyal, threatened to leave, or had a great quarter.

Those are all things you want to recognize or address. But they’re poor reasons to change someone’s role inside your organization.

When someone receives a promotion before they’ve consistently demonstrated the next level of responsibility, the company is making a bet. Sometimes that bet pays off. Sometimes it doesn’t. The perks of the promotion, things like title, salary, and positional authority, came before the performance.

There’s another benefit to building structured career paths that I didn’t expect. It develops better managers.

Many supervisors know who their strongest employees are, but asking them to explain exactly why can be surprisingly difficult. They know it when they see it, but they haven’t translated that instinct into objective standards.

Building career paths forces them to do exactly that.

Once excellence is clearly defined, coaching becomes dramatically more effective because managers stop speaking in vague terms like “take more ownership” or “show more leadership.” They can point to specific expectations that separate one level from the next.

The better a career path is defined, the fewer promotion debates you’ll have. Not because people stop asking. Because everyone already understands what is required to be ready for the next promotion. The standards exist before the conversation ever begins.

Good systems remove the need to have unnecessary one-off conversations. With promotion criteria pre-defined, it’s just a matter of letting the process play out.

You have processes for other parts of your business. Sales, client onboarding, and performance reviews should all have a process.

Promotions deserve one too.

If promotions in your company still depend on who the manager is, how persuasive the employee is, or what happened over the last few weeks, you may be making the same mistake we were.

You’re not evaluating people against a standard. You’re deciding the standard every time someone asks.

Have you defined exactly what earns a promotion in your business, or does every promotion still get decided one conversation at a time? I’d love to hear how you’ve approached this. Email me directly at er**@*********ds.com.

~ Erik