This article is part of the Design Your Promotion and Get Paid at the Right Number course. Click here to explore the full course.
Your manager told you he sees you in a bigger role, and you’ve been working toward that conversation ever since. None of it is written anywhere. It lives in one person’s memory, and a reorg can make somebody else your manager three months before your review.
Erfan Hesami’s manager raised the promotion before Erfan did. Three months before the annual review, a reorg put another manager between them and moved the old one a level up. The company’s first offer was 12%. Erfan finished with the lead title and 22%.
A written case carried that promotion across the reorg. Maybe his old manager’s word would have been enough on its own. I wouldn’t bet a year of work on finding out.
A promise from a one-to-one belongs to whoever made it
When your manager says he sees you in a bigger role, that’s an intention. He built it out of a year of watching you work, and it’s stored in his head and nowhere else. A reorg moves the only person holding it.
The new manager inherits your team and your review date, and has never seen a day of the year your old manager watched. He’s also the one who now argues for you, in a meeting you’ll never sit in, for a promise somebody else made.
And your manager rarely decides this alone. I sit on promotion committees, and the group asks whichever manager is in front of it. After a reorg, that’s the manager who knows you least.
Then the review comes round and the new manager tells you nobody briefed him. Your old manager is a level up and busy with his half of the reorg. Everybody agrees you’re good, and nobody has a damn thing to take into the committee.
If your promotion only exists in your manager’s memory, it leaves when your manager does.
The whole run, meeting by meeting, is in the Promotion OS in Erfan’s case, start to finish.
