When promotions become the goal, firms miss the real work of building leaders, influence, and long-term engagement.
This past year, while reviewing responses from Zweig Group’s Best Firms To Work For survey, one comment stood out. The comment expressed the respondents’ interest in being promoted twice in the next two years! This seemed crazy to us – an organization of our size, we have roughly seven job titles between entry-level positions and CEO.
This comment seemed like something that could easily be dismissed, however, it aligned with recent staff conversations, so it merited deeper considerations. Millennials, and now Gen Zers, have been told the quickest route to career and income growth is to job hop. If your firm solely relies on an archaic method of prioritizing years of experience, maybe this is the case. However, this is often a misconception; we would argue that growth of industry leadership and professional influence tends to provide the fastest route to more income and new job titles.
As leaders in AEC firms, many of us work in organizations of fewer than 500 – or even 100 – people, and because of that we wear many hats and often lead beyond our job title. We accepted these roles well before earning the role of manager, principal, vice president, or some other fancy title. So, how do we coach the often-intangible measure of leadership and influence as a primary means to obtain the very tangible roles and compensation employees seek. We need to start by coaching a career builder mindset and addressing the promotion misconception.
The promotion misconception
For many, promotions are the currency of success and career growth. In small and midsize AEC firms, our organizations usually have few roles between entry-level professional and the CEO. We don’t have the luxury, or ability, to provide annual promotions. When we promote too frequently we risk creating:
- Limited perspective. Employees equate success with titles, not capabilities.
- Short-term motivation. If the promotion doesn’t occur engagement dips.
- Social comparison. People watch closely at how quickly their peers achieve a promotion.
This is the promotion misconception – it assumes that growth is a direct path, rather than something that is built through depth of knowledge and influence, usually with a few laterals moves along the way. We as leaders need to help our employees recognize that promotions and career building are not the same.
How to coach a career building mindset:
- Redefine progress and the raise process. Annual reviews should focus on key growth areas such as: development of skills and expertise, leadership and influence, client impact, and contribution to firm success. Raises need to recognize employees’ success in these areas. They shouldn’t need a promotion to be paid competitively.
- Make learning core to culture. Leaders need to encourage and support (including financially) trainings, education, licensure, and certifications. Celebrate employees succeeding in these areas and find ways to reward them for improving the firm’s ability to win work and generate revenue.
- Celebrate lateral movement. There seems to be a stigma for when an employee has a role change that is not a promotion. Phrases like “guess they couldn’t handle it” are tossed around at the water cooler. Stop this stigma before it starts by celebrating lateral moves – with a similar publicity as promotions.
- Create roles beyond the employee’s core job. Many employees are a project engineer or GIS technician, but they often wear hats in business development or leading a company culture group. It is still critical that employees are sound in their core job, but someone needs to plan those weekend 5K runs!
- Align career growth with firm strategy. Help employees connect their personal development to the firm’s direction. When people see how their growth supports new markets, technologies, or client relationships, they find greater meaning in their work.
A case study: Defining employee roles in business development
To align employee interest in role definition, and our firm’s need to develop business and increase sales, we implemented a business development model that expanded beyond the classic seller/doer model. Our model focused on business development responsibilities in three categories and assigned roles to employees throughout the organization. These roles included:
- Client builder. Client builders are all external facing positions, they are responsible for delivering quality and timely services and building relationships with the individuals they are working with at the respective customer firms.
- Firm builders. Firm builders, in addition to being great client builders, are responsible for managing relationships and multiple projects with customer firms we work with. Their goal is to make sure we are connecting widely through customer firms and securing as much work as possible from those firms.
- Business builders. Business builders are responsible for developing new customer relationships for BHC. They represent our brand at multiple industry and community organizations and seek out new prospects.
Defining these roles seems simple, but by doing so we are able to give legitimacy to the expectations we have of our client facing employees. It has also put our business development leaders in a place to set and manage expectations of staff outside of their supervisory structure. This allows us to have better and more frequent performance management conversations, leading to more informed raise practices.
Similar to business development roles within our company, there are additional opportunities to lead culture groups, mentor interns, and support internal innovation. All these individuals participating in these roles hone their leadership and influence within our organization, and receive feedback and mentoring beyond their direct supervisor, or even business unit.
Returning to the Best Firms To Work For comment that started this. It would be great if we could remind the employee of their achievements and make sure those achievements are considered in our raise process, then help them identify new roles in which to get involved in and build their leadership and influence. It is this career building mindset managers must seek to develop in staff if we are to retain great people and keep up employee engagement. Firm leadership and HR need to make sure the raise process aligns with the development of employees’ leadership and influence, and not just “years in the seat.”
With anonymous feedback we cannot respond directly to the individual, but it is our goal to respond with daily improvement in the objectives we listed out previously.
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Michael Makris, P.E. is a project manager at BHC. Connect with him on LinkedIn. |
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Laura Terrebonne is a senior business development planning manager at BHC. Connect with her on LinkedIn. |