Over the years I have successfully advocated for promotion cases. It has taught me that promotion advocacy isn’t just about documenting good performance; it’s about crafting compelling narratives that align individual growth with business needs.

Every Monday, I write a post related to my leadership playbook. Today, I am sharing the framework I have developed and the specific strategies that work for promotions.

Why Most Promotion Advocacy Fails

I’ve seen many well-intentioned managers fail at promotion advocacy because they approach it like a performance review:

• “Alice is a great team player”
• “Bob consistently meets his goals”
• “Alice has been here for two years and deserves recognition”

These arguments miss the fundamental question promotion committees ask: “Why does promoting this person serve the organization’s strategic interests?”

The Three-Pillar Promotion Framework

Pillar 1: Current Level Mastery with Evidence

Don’t just assert that someone has mastered their current level but prove it with specific examples.

For Bob (IC-4 → IC-5): “Bob has consistently demonstrated Senior Engineer capabilities while officially at IC-4 level. His technical leadership on our service migration included architecture design across three teams, coordination with platform infrastructure, and mentoring junior engineers through the transition. When our user authentication system needed emergency redesign due to security requirements, Bob not only delivered the solution in 48 hours but created documentation and runbooks that prevented similar incidents.”

Why this works: Specific technical achievements, leadership behavior, and business impact are all documented.

For Alice (IC-2 → IC-3): “Alice has shown remarkable ownership of complex projects typically assigned to more senior engineers. Her work on the UI redesign involved gathering requirements from five different user personas, proposing three alternative architectural approaches with trade-offs analysis, and implementing a solution that reduced user-reported UI issues by 70%. More importantly, she identified UX gaps in our design process and provided constructive feedback to our design team, showing the systems thinking we expect at IC-3 level.”

Pillar 2: Next Level Performance Demonstration

The strongest promotion cases show the person already operating at the next level.

Bob’s IC-5 Evidence:

• Technical Strategy: Led architectural decisions affecting multiple teams
• Organizational Impact: Created reusable patterns adopted by other engineering groups
• Mentorship: Developed junior engineers who became productive independent contributors
• Business Alignment: Connected technical decisions to business outcomes consistently

Alice’s IC-3 Evidence:

• Independent Execution: Completed complex projects with minimal oversight
• Technical Decision-Making: Proposed and defended architectural choices
• Cross-Functional Impact: Improved processes beyond just his immediate work
• Growth Mindset: Actively sought feedback and applied it to improve outcomes

Pillar 3: Strategic Organizational Value

This pillar answers: “How does this promotion serve broader organizational goals?”

For Senior Promotions (like Bob): “Promoting Bob addresses two strategic needs: first, it recognizes and retains high-performing technical talent in a competitive market; second, it gives us additional senior technical leadership capacity as we scale the engineering organization. His promotion enables us to distribute technical leadership across more teams rather than creating bottlenecks around a few senior engineers.”

For Mid-Level Promotions (like Alice): “Alice’s promotion creates a clear growth path that demonstrates our commitment to developing engineers internally. Her progression from IC-2 to IC-3 in eight months shows other junior engineers that rapid growth is possible with strong performance. Additionally, her generalist skills make her valuable across multiple projects, increasing our team’s flexibility and resilience.”

The Evidence Collection Strategy

Promotion advocacy requires systematic evidence gathering throughout the review period:

Technical Contributions Portfolio

• Project Leadership: Specific examples of projects owned and delivered
• Technical Decisions: Architecture choices made and their outcomes
• Problem-Solving: Complex problems solved independently
• Code Quality: Examples of excellent technical execution

Leadership and Influence Examples

• Mentoring: Junior engineers developed or helped
• Cross-Team Impact: Contributions beyond immediate team boundaries
• Process Improvements: Systems or workflows enhanced
• Knowledge Sharing: Documentation, presentations, or training provided

Business Impact Documentation

• User Experience: Features that improved customer satisfaction
• Performance: Systems improvements with measurable outcomes
• Efficiency: Process changes that saved time or resources
• Innovation: New approaches or technologies successfully introduced

Next week, I will continue on this post and talk about how to write effective promotion cases and defend them.