How to Know if Your Middle is Ready to Become a Senior? A Guide for Team Leads (and Others)
But the key thing at this stage is to indicate the value of a specific candidate from a business perspective. And this is where the team lead's influence is important – he sees the work process both from the inside and from the outside and is therefore able to succinctly describe the business benefits of a specific developer. I had an example with a really good candidate, with interesting cases and extensive expertise at the intersection of mathematics and programming, but when compiling the questionnaire, he simply failed
sell your skills
to show how he worked with specific commercial requests with his solutions, and I helped him fix it 🙂
But what if the candidate fails?
I will say right away that such situations happen quite rarely – the overwhelming majority of middles pass the promotion on the first try and receive the coveted senior grade. For example, this year more than 93 percent of candidates were graded! However, there are also reverse situations.
In fact, the example of one failed candidate that I mentioned earlier can be called a textbook one. The most common reason for denial of promotion is if the team lead in the application could not explain the value of specific tasks completed by the candidate from a business point of view. That is why I emphasize this so much: it can be as effective and experienced a specialist as you like, but if you failed to include cases in the application confirming commercial profit, the chances are slim.
But this is all just poetry, the person has already been rejected, what to do now?
At this point, it is very important for the team leader to review all the tasks and cases of a specific specialist and re-compile an individual plan for the employee for the next six months – until the next promotion.
Important: After the rejection, the candidate and team leader receive anonymous feedback from experts – and this is a real treasure trove for analysis, which should be used one hundred percent! I recommend focusing the middle's attention on improving the specific competencies mentioned in the feedback – and based on them, build a further work plan. Simply put, preparation for the “retake” of promotion requires a major restructuring of work tasks.
What to do if you are a team leader not in big tech and you don’t have centralized ways to promote employees?
If you don't have a useful tool, you can always create one 🙂 For this, I recommend studying
about how this process is organized for them.
Here are the main points I can recommend:
The process must be transparent and understandable. The developer must understand what specific requirements he needs to work with and what he needs to prepare for.
The process must be collective. The decision to raise must be agreed upon with at least one other expert – pluralism of opinions is above all!
In addition, the team leader can in some cases independently formulate the criteria for transferring a specialist to a senior grade. I would recommend that before making a decision, you definitely consult with an “independent expert”. This could be a senior+ specialist from another department who has already interacted with your candidate. This way, you will get a broader picture of the prospects of a specific specialist and will be able to be more confident in his readiness (or unreadiness) for promotion.
How to sell promotion to business?
And now our dear reader-team leader may be wondering: the method is good, convenient for both parties, but how exactly to implement it in the company?
First of all, you need to understand whether your company needs promotion. We are talking about two important criteria:
- The size of the team and the size of the company itself. If the development team is small and the manager can independently determine the grade of employees, such a system may be unnecessary. But if the number of developers exceeds at least 50 people, it is high time to think about centralized promotion, because in this case it will be difficult to focus equally on all candidates.
- Type of company. If we are talking about a non-tech company or a startup that is still growing, the introduction of promotion can turn into a cargo cult that slows down the work. The same applies to custom development agencies.
For those whose teams do fit these criteria, I spoke with our HR BPs Marina Sergiets and Anastasia Filippi – they shared with me the steps that need to be taken when implementing the promotion process (no thanks)).
1) Work with HR
The most practical way to introduce promotion into business is to start with communication with the HR department – they may have useful facts, based on which you can put forward specific hypotheses about the need for “reform”. Perhaps there is a turnover of middle specialists in some teams? Or seniors note the difficulty of promoting their specialists? We consider all possible situations – and use available metrics to record potential “pains” of leads and seniors.
2) Get to know the problems “directly”
Communication with representatives of different teams will be no less useful. Important: here it is worth paying attention to the different hierarchies of specialists. It is equally worth listening to the position of both the lead and the promising middle. This way you will learn the pain points and avoid the fate of an elephant in a china shop – a measure “imposed from above” without “probing” is unlikely to be effective and will only push the teams away from any changes.
3) Fight the skepticism of techies – and find allies
Well, you are almost at the finish line – the presentation of the concept to the final boss CTO (and possibly the CEO). At this stage, you will definitely have to answer questions about whether the game is worth the candle? Is organizing such a process worth the valuable time of experts who will review the questionnaires of middles in their already jam-packed work schedule?
Here it is especially important for you to record the benefit of the “reform”: promotion increases the motivation of middles and reduces their turnover. With this approach, a specialist can accurately calculate his career track and will not think about leaving the team because of the vague prospects of promotion. Here you will be helped by the fact sheet of “pains” that you previously collected from HR and specialists from other teams.
Another mutual benefit is the incentive for development. The promotion motivates both developers, who work more actively with complex tasks to improve their application, and experts, who can see cases that are not typical for their project and enrich their experience.
4) Motivate experts
One of the main challenges that you will have to face when implementing a promotion is finding experts. It is sometimes difficult to convince developers to allocate time for additional activity in the form of participation in the promotion. And in fact, it is understandable: already busy seniors need to put aside their work and review applications from middles.
In short, to increase motivation, we try to “highlight” our experts and demonstrate their usefulness to the team and the company – psychologists call this a smart word moral stimulation. And I must say, it works: we managed to attract 62 experts to the last promotion.
However, this can only work if there is a developed corporate culture (forgive the banality) – it is especially cool when experts themselves realize the importance of their contribution to the development of their colleagues.
What to do if a developer who plans to become a senior comes across this text?
In this case, I have prepared simple recommendations on how to prepare for a promotion for the candidate himself. By the way, we have already partially touched on this topic in
about the nuances of a C++ developer's career – I recommend reading it!
Discuss your desires in advance – for example, 1-2-1
Unfortunately, team leads can't read minds (at least I certainly can't), so ideally the middle should indicate his goals. If the employee himself doesn't take the initiative to develop his skills, the team lead will hardly be able to perceive him as a candidate for promotion.
Look at your challenges from a business decision perspective
A senior must first and foremost be useful and relevant to the business – and it is with this optics that you need to approach any task. Technical hard skills are an absolute base, but you must always understand what specific commercial needs they help you to meet.
Well, I'll keep the third life hack a secret for now: if you want to know about it, come to us at Kaspersky Lab 🙂
Instead of a conclusion
Promotion to senior grade is a complex stage that requires a team leader to be highly involved in a specific candidate. Centralized promotion in this regard makes life much easier for both the manager and the candidate — both understand the rules of the game and can prepare for specific promotion criteria. That is why we actively use this method at Kaspersky Lab: in 2023 alone, almost 100 specialists successfully received the grade. Sounds tempting, doesn't it? 🙂
