Curiosity
Transparency may be one of your company’s professional values, whether it’s explicit or implicit. Whatever the case, you should see curiosity as a strength. When an employee asks questions, that’s a sign that they’re engaged and trusting. This trust also shows that you’ve created more psychological safety in your workplace.
Comfortable with feedback
Giving feedback to employees builds trust, motivates them to improve, and shows that you care about their growth. However, team members should also understand the role that empathy plays in feedback, especially in managerial positions.
Managerial & leadership skills (management roles)
Not all employees seeking promotions want to manage people or develop the skills they’d need to do so effectively. Indeed, a 2024 CoderPad study revealed that as many as 36% of tech workers didn’t want to take on a managerial role. As this reality becomes more apparent, people-oriented companies are trying to create more diverse opportunities for internal mobility and non-managerial growth.
Personal motivation
Motivated, engaged employees tend to be 23% more productive. This knowledge has led many organizations to ramp up their engagement initiatives with employee surveys and rewards and recognition programs. However, many businesses fail to understand how multifaceted motivation is in their employees.
Sustainably exceeding expectations
You need to ensure that you measure employee success against objective benchmarks like performance reviews and goals and OKRs — and not based on your own potentially biased perception or instincts.
Let’s say that, when looking back at a candidate’s recent review cycle, you see that they’ve exceeded expectations. While that’s a great start, you should look back at more performance reviews.
Fit for the role
When you’re promoting from within, it can be easy to assume that your candidate has enough familiarity with your culture and processes. However, it’s a good idea to assess them the same way you would with an external candidate:
Tenure or experience
Anyone making a hiring decision or thinking about reasons for a promotion should be cautious of promoting solely or even mostly based on time with the company. It can cause employees to feel that they won’t be able to earn a promotion without stagnating in the same job for a few years.
Excelling in their current role
You can use your competency framework to help determine if your employee has excelled in the technical and soft skills that are relevant to their current role. You can also ask their peers or colleagues they may have worked with on cross-functional projects for their input — 360° performance reviews are the perfect moment for that.
Strong self-management skills
An employee may want to take on more responsibilities and work with less managerial intervention. If they do, they need to demonstrate great self-management skills.
Future-oriented
The future of work demands that we no longer rely on external experts to be well-informed about organizational trends and innovations. Instead, forward-looking companies should ask that leadership and people ops teams stay current and open channels for employees to participate in these conversations.