Thoughts on Organizational Design - Career Progression

Admittedly, it's easier to get promoted in some situations than others.

In my last post on management, I riffed on organization sizes and how to ensure that the company doesn't begin to sag under its own bureaucracy.  Today, I'm going to provide thoughts on career progressions within a company, especially in the context of flatter or smaller organizations (again focusing on the engineering department).

I'm going to use the example of an org with a common ratio of 8, so 

1 CTO + 8 Group Leaders + 64 Line Managers + 512 Individual Contributors = 585 total employees

It's not a small organization by any means, but it certainly doesn't match the size of the Tech behemoths I've been maligning lately.

It is also, curiously, the approximate size and shape of the organization I felt most valued at in my career, but I'm sure that didn't have any bearing on my opinion.  Like my robot peers, I'm able to peel away all bias and only display true facts.

The first thing that might jump out to most readers is that the organization is flat - only 3 hops between the CTO and the engineers.  I like this efficiency.  The message getting passed down from tech leadership to the organization doesn't have many opportunities to get misinterpreted.  It also reduces the CTO's ability to hide behind the upper echelons of the organization.  They're more accountable to the people underneath them.

That's the positive effect of a flat org.  The negative effect is that it ostensibly reduces chances for promotion, primarily at the management level.  

The individual contributor level tends to be more fluid, because (1) they make up the bulk of the organization (>87% in this case) and (2) they're technically on the more junior side of the ladder, so the perceived promotion stakes aren't as high.  Typically, I've seen the engineers' wing progress from Software Engineer (SE) I to SE 2 to Senior SE to Principal SE with a few other wrinkles depending on the org.

I'm inclined to throw in an SE 3 between SE 1 and SE 2 and a Lead SE between Sr. SE and Principal SE to provide more explicit markers for career growth at (typically) earlier stages of one's career.  Determining what the criteria are for promoting an individual is the subject of much debate, so I'll leave the career framework for another post.

At the management level, there's still a lot of room for growth, even if it isn't immediately obvious.  Within the 3 layers of management, it's possible to promote people through a progression of Manager, Sr. Manager, Director, Sr. Director, and Vice President.  In my world, Sr. VP is reserved for the executive suite (i.e. the CTO).  I suppose it's possible to add an Executive VP to the progression, but I'm going to assume there's no title higher than Sr. VP.

I'm also anticipating that the Manager, Sr. Manager, and Director levels map to the group of 64 above, and the Sr. Directors and VPs are in the smaller group of 8.  

In the case of managers and limited vertical movement, we need to answer this question:  how do we keep managers engaged even if their team sizes aren't going to grow with a promotion? For me, the answer is - continue to expand their scope.  

As I anticipate writing more in-depth proposals for career growth soon, I'll leave most of the details aside, but a newly minted manager should focus on ensuring their team runs smoothly and meets expectations; a senior manager should be able to leave most day-to-day operations of the team to its own devices and work on strengthening ties with peers (as well as increasing the potential for cooperative pairings with other teams); and a director should focus on a scope that reaches across several teams and looks for improvement within the entire group they're a member of.

All of these titles may still have 1 team of 8 reporting to them individually, but there's a capacity for growth and leadership potential that exists by expanding the manager's expected impact on the org.

At the group of 8 level, Sr. Directors should take on challenges that impact the entire technology department.  VPs need to show continued excellence in the Group Leader role and initiate a greater collaboration with other departments throughout the company.  They should also possess a strong understanding of the company's business fundamentals.

Nothing here is particularly novel, but that's management theory.  The theory itself isn't complicated; the execution is.  People are varied and diverse and the main directive of management is to ensure that employees are able to function well in improving the business's position because of (or despite) the varied viewpoints.  As soon as you start reducing employees to numbers for measurement, you're losing the primary advantage your company has to compete.  In normalization, you lose the creativity that shines on the edges.

Even with this rather basic outline of the positions, though, there are still a couple of subtle factors we've already addressed:  

• You've created an org that's an appropriate size for its task.  In doing so, you've reduced volatility around org size - the less bloat there is, the less you and your employees need to worry about layoffs in the future.  You've also sent a strong signal that empire-building isn't important at your company, and you preemptively shape the culture by discouraging those who only measure their output by team size from joining.  (Sidebar: The perfect organization size is probably one that's smaller than the one you believe you need to accomplish the work and larger than one you feel comfortable paying for).
• In demarcating the responsibilities for each title, you're giving people clarity about expectations and a path for career development.  There's never going to be an objective measure of what constitutes better for a manager, because people are complex.  But the more you can let people control their own destiny, the more sure-footed (and, therefore, engaged) they'll feel.  Having specific milestones (with some reasonable leeway around them)  holds the nastiest aspects of office politics that bubble up in chaos at arm's length.  That means it's one less thing people have to focus on instead of doing their job.

Finally, what about promotion justifications and the "business needs" they're tied to?  At the individual contributor level, I don't believe this is a concern.  Promote people when they're ready.  If you find one team becoming top-heavy, you can always look at moving more senior engineers to other teams (though, it should always be in consultation with the engineer).  If the organization is top-heavy, concentrate on recruiting junior engineers until you achieve an organic balance.

I find the conversations around promoting the most senior engineers due to "business need" a bit dubious.  If I'm promoting someone to Principal Engineer, I expect them to expand the scope of their role and their team's role, so they create the business need rather than meet it.  Restricting an engineer from promotion due to a factor completely outside of their control erodes their engagement and will likely cost you more in recruiting and training anyway to replace them.

My promotion advice for managers is exactly the opposite.  You don't want to expand the management hierarchy, because, in doing so, you begin to undermine the advantages of a streamlined organization.  In order to keep your managers engaged, you need to constantly reinforce their contributions to the organization by expanding their scope, recognizing their contributions loudly, and paying them for their commensurate performance, not for their title.  This last principle applies to your individual contributors who've topped out on the career level as well.

Until next time my human and robot friends.