Your engineers don't know what "Ready for Promotion" actually means

You think the path is clear. They're navigating in the dark - and starting to resent it.

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There’s a phrase that gets tossed around in promotion conversations that makes engineering managers somewhat uncomfortable: “You need to demonstrate you can operate at the next level first”.

It sounds reasonable. Promotions shouldn’t be speculative. You want evidence someone can handle increased scope before you formalise it. Fair enough.

But in practice your engineer spends a year doing next-level work, assumes they’re on track, and then discovers - often in a performance review - that they were missing something you never told them about. A specific type of project. A visibility requirement. Something that seemed obvious to y…