#79 JooBee's newsletter

TL;DR

🙋🏻 What if employees could decide when they're ready for promotion? 

🦄 How Alan (a French unicorn) gives employees ownership of their promotions

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What if employees could decide when they're ready for promotion? 

It's that time of year again, and promotion conversations are starting!

For those of us in HR, we spend a lot of time trying to design the best possible promotion process. Career frameworks, feedback mechanisms, promotion criteria, calibration meetings, promotion committees… the list goes on.

Our goal is to make the process as fair and consistent as possible. But I want you to think about this from the employee's perspective for a moment.

For many employees, promotion decisions are still a black box

Think about what they actually experience. Their manager puts them forward for promotion. They wait, sometimes for an agonising amount of time, while conversations happen somewhere behind closed doors. Eventually, a decision comes back.

If it's a yes, wonderful! If it's a no, hopefully they receive some useful feedback about why. And I say hopefully because we know that's not always the case. But even with good feedback, the employee has spent most of the process waiting for other people to decide their fate. 

For many, the biggest influence they have over their promotion is telling their manager they want one. And even when they're involved in building their case, there are still two hurdles that leave them heavily dependent on their manager.

Hurdle 1️⃣: Their manager needs to believe they're ready

And this is where biases can already creep in. An employee may think they're ready for promotion, but their manager thinks they need another six months. Meanwhile, the employee sees another manager who has already put forward half their team.

Now, I'm not suggesting managers are deliberately being unfair. But managers are human. They have different expectations, experiences and biases, which inevitably influence how they assess someone's readiness.

Hurdle 2️⃣: How good their manager is at advocating for them

Some managers are brilliant at it. They know how to gather evidence, articulate someone's contribution and build a compelling case for promotion. Others… not so much.

Which means an employee's chances of getting promoted can depend not only on how well they've performed, but also on how well their manager can represent that performance.

Have we designed promotion processes around everyone except the employee?

Think about it. We've designed processes where the person who has the most at stake often has the least ownership of making the case, leaving them heavily dependent on their manager.

Of course, managers have a responsibility to develop their people, advocate for them and contribute to promotion decisions. But I also believe that:

And who is more invested in a promotion than the employee themselves? So why not give them more ownership of putting themselves forward and making their case?

Giving employees ownership doesn't mean giving them the promotion

Now, I can almost hear some of you saying, "OMG JooBee, if we do that, EVERYONE is going to put themselves forward!" 😅

Well, maybe!

But putting yourself forward doesn't mean you automatically get promoted. It simply gives employees the opportunity to demonstrate why they believe they're ready. After all, there's a big difference between having the right to make a case and having the right to a promotion.

The decision still sits with the organisation. What changes is who gets to initiate the conversation and make the case. Making promotions fairer isn't just about how we make the final decision, but who gets the opportunity to be considered in the first place.

And this isn't just a theoretical idea. Alan, a French insurtech unicorn, is already doing exactly this. Let me show you how in the next section.

How Alan (a French unicorn) gives employees ownership of their promotions

And no, they haven't simply added self-nomination to a typical promotion process. They've built a system of checks and balances to give employees ownership while keeping promotion decisions fair and evidence-based.

Let me walk you through how it works today.

1️⃣ Employees decide when to put themselves forward

Alan has two promotion cycles, one in January and another in July. Instead of waiting for their manager to nominate them, employees can opt in to what Alan calls a Level Review.

Every employee has an Internal Coach who supports their development (sometimes from outside their team) and a Community* Lead (similar to a functional manager). When they believe they're ready, they discuss it with both before opting in.

I think there's something powerful about employees deciding when to put themselves forward, even if their manager disagrees. They own the decision to make their case, even if the final promotion decision isn't theirs.

2️⃣ Employees build their case, supported by continuous feedback

Employees prepare a self-review explaining their impact over the past 6 -12 months.

But they aren't starting from scratch. Alan has a strong culture of continuous feedback, with employees expected to gather at least three pieces of feedback per quarter. There are two types:

• Flash feedback: Short, timely feedback on something someone has done.

• Trajectory feedback: More detailed feedback about someone's growth and development.

I've always believed that if we gather feedback throughout the year, performance, salary and promotion decisions should simply be about bringing together evidence we already have. (I've written about this in 360 Feedback is broken: here's one alternative.)

And that's exactly what happens at Alan. By the time employees put themselves forward for promotion, they already have a sense of their readiness and the evidence to make their case.

3️⃣ Three peers review the evidence

Rather than relying solely on their manager, three peers assess the employee's performance.

Employees nominate their three reviewers, with guidance from their Internal Coach. Their proposed reviewers are then validated and can be challenged by Community Leads and deputies. For senior employees, more than one reviewers are expected to come from outside their team. Which makes sense, because the more senior you become, the more your impact should extend beyond your immediate function.

Each reviewer completes a structured scorecard assessing three things:

• Culture: How they work. Observable behaviours grounded in Alan's principles, such as ownership, transparency and no-ego collaboration. 

• Impact: What they deliver. The value you create, judged on the scope and complexity of your work and the quality and speed of your execution. 

• Expertise: Their craft. The skills their discipline calls for, as defined by their own community. 

(I particularly like that impact is assessed separately from expertise. Having the skills doesn't necessarily mean you're delivering the outcomes!)

Each level has a defined performance profile. Currently, scorecard results go through calibration to determine who enters the promotion cohort (the longer-term goal is automatic entry for employees who meet the next-level requirements). But scorecards aren't considered in isolation. Reviewers also consider employees' self-reviews and feedback received throughout the year before making a final decision.

4️⃣ The promotion committee makes the final decision

Employees who meet the peer review criteria go through calibration before being considered for promotion. Decision-making depends on seniority:

• Junior and intermediate: In larger communities, a senior team member makes the final decision, with the Community Lead challenging. In smaller communities, the Community Lead decides.

• Senior: The Community Lead decides, with the help of a challenger from outside the team.

• Highest levels: The committee includes Alan’s CEO, CTO and CFO.

What I particularly like is that every promotion decision has a designated challenger. Having multiple people involved isn't the same as having someone explicitly responsible for questioning assumptions and checking for potential bias.

So, while employees own putting themselves forward, but the organisation owns the final decision, with checks and balances built in. Alan also sets a high bar: employees must have sustainably performed at the next level. If there's doubt, the answer is no, with clear guidance on what's missing.

What can we learn from Alan?

Before we rush off to introduce self-nomination, wait….🤚

Giving employees ownership only works when the rest of the system supports it. Employees need clear expectations of what the next level looks like, continuous feedback to understand their readiness and a fair assessment process with checks and balances.

Oh, and did I mention that ALL promotion decisions and feedback at Alan can be publicly discussed across the company? 😱🤯

I know, I know… there's so much more to unpack! But Alan's feedback culture deserves a whole newsletter of its own. And yes, I'll be writing one about it soon! 

For now, my biggest takeaway is this: Employee ownership and organisational accountability aren't mutually exclusive. A well-designed promotion process needs both.

* A community is the group of people who share the same craft, such as Engineering, Care or Sales 

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