Hey!

Welcome back to another week of musings.

This week we started our moving process. It's exciting and low-key nerve-racking all at once. I hope your week had a bit less chaos than mine.

I hope you managed to rest for the week ahead!

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Things I enjoyed in the past week

• Changing a team's culture, a good read if you're thinking about how leadership attention shapes what a team actually cares about.
• Middle management roles are also a trap Worth a read if you're weighing what a middle-management role actually prepares you for.

With promo season ramping up, I've spent the last few weeks thinking about something I don't fully have an answer to: how do you actually know someone is ready to get promoted?

I don't mean the corporate PDF in SharePoint. Every company has one of those, laid out in a leveling doc somewhere, with bullet points on scope, impact, and ambiguity. I'm talking about the way I actually gauge a person when their manager asks, "Hey, do you think they're ready for promotion?"

I've been building a framework for this. It's incomplete, and I want to say that up front because I think that's part of the point. It's less a checklist and more a set of questions I keep asking myself, moving from the easy-to-measure to more "vibe" stuff.

The Measurable Stuff

This is the part that's closest to what companies already track. Are they delivering? Not just busy, but actually shipping the things they said they would. I wrote last week about the say-do ratio, and this is where that shows up first. Are they underpromising and overdelivering, or is it the other way around?

I also look at where their time goes, and how they execute. Like, they're heads down working on a proof of concept; do they align people or teams before starting, or do they just try to force their way through?

The Vibes stuff

After a certain point, it's less about tickets or documents and more about vibes. They're also input, in their own way.

Do people actually enjoy working with this person? Are they open when someone comes to them with a question? Do they show up outside their own lane? How are they seen by their team or peers?

When they are present, do they contribute in meaningful ways?

This is just a personal point of view

My point of view will keep evolving as I meet more people and work with other companies, hearing more anecdotes, etc. In other cases, you can do "everything" well, but if there's no business case, then there's that.

The other reason it's incomplete is that promo panels might rotate, and the message has to be adapted to new audiences, in a way. So a lot of these parts need to be framed or ignored depending on who's reading.

In other cases, I've seen people never get promoted, so they leave to get the promotion they're looking for. And on the flip side, I've seen people never actively seek out promotions.

Your turn

How do you read someone's readiness for promotion, outside of whatever your company's official rubric says? Is there a "vibes" component in your own head that you'd never admit to writing down?

Let me know your thoughts by replying to this email!

Happy coding!