😬 Performance ≠ promotion (mixing them screws everyone)

TL;DR

😬 Performance ≠ promotion (mixing them screws everyone)

🧭From principles to process: How to build clarity in promotions

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Performance ≠ promotion (mixing them screws everyone)

Nick Fury once said: “I recognise the council has made a decision, but given that it’s a stupid-ass decision, I’ve elected to ignore it.”

That’s exactly how I felt years ago (before I joined HR) when my manager told me I couldn’t be rated 5 out of 5 because a top score was reserved for people “ready” for promotion. (I knew I wasn’t ready for the next role. But I was f***ing great at the one I was in.)

Apologies to that manager 😅 — I later realised it wasn’t you, it was the system.
So let me rephrase: it was the most stupid-ass system I’d ever seen.

Performance review and promotion are not the same thing

Performance review = past.
How well did someone deliver on their current role? Where did they excel? Where can they grow further in their current role?

Promotion = future.
What do they need to deliver in the next role? Where are the capabilitys gaps? How can we help them build towards the next role?

Too often, companies collapse these into one messy process, 🎲gambling that strong performance now = strong performance later. Sometimes it works. Mostly, it fails.

3 reasons to split Performance Reviews from Promotion decisions

When I joined HR, I wanted managers and employees to have clarity (not confusion), so I split the two processes.

Here’s why this matters:

1. Not everyone wants a promotion

Yes, really. Some people love what they do and want to excel at it — without wanting the next role, now. I learned this the hard way, watching a manager slide a promotion letter across the table, only for the employee to slide it back. “No, thanks,” she said. “I don’t want more responsibility for a few years.” 

Jaw, meet floor 😮.

She was right. Why should someone be capped at 4 over 5 just because they didn’t want a promotion? We should create space for people to excel in-role — and reward them in ways that matter beyond promotion.

2. One can be 3 over 5 or 4 over 5 and still ready for promotion

Stretching into a new role takes energy. If someone is consistently meeting expectations in their current role, it makes sense that their extra effort goes into learning the next one. As a business, of course we should expect them to get their current role right — while also giving them the safety to get things wrong as they stretch into the future role. That’s how learning happens.

If we evaluate both roles the same way, we create a conflict of interest⚖️. And where will people optimise? For the role with the bigger consequences: the current one (the job they could lose if they fail). And that leaves no room for learning.

3. Reduce organisational risk

Too often, promotion decisions sit in the unspoken assumptions of a manager’s head — intangible and inconsistent. That’s risky when such important people decisions in a company are shaped by personal beliefs or past experiences.

I champion splitting performance reviews from promotion decisions, but I don’t claim it’s the only way. What I strongly advise is this: make the intangible tangible. Create clarity so decisions are made consistently across the organisation — reducing not just the risk of someone failing in a role, but also the risk of dissatisfaction and morale drops caused by inconsistent judgments.

The right system sets people up to succeed today and tomorrow

In the end, this isn’t about process for process’s sake. It’s about clarity, fairness and setting people up to succeed. Performance reviews should celebrate what someone has achieved and help them grow in their current role. Promotions should prepare people for what’s ahead, with the right support to bridge the gaps.

When we collapse the two, we create confusion, bias and unnecessary risk. When we split them, we give managers sharper tools, employees clearer paths and organisations stronger odds of getting the big bets right.

That’s not a “stupid-ass system.” That’s a system that serves people and the business.

* Zelt didn’t realise what they’d done with the above, but they hit the perfect note of one of my favourite songs = Smooth like butter 😉

From principles to process: How to build clarity in promotions

If you want to split promotion decisions from performance reviews, where do you start? 

By getting your ducks in a row🦆🦆🦆. Because if you don’t, you’ll end up chasing ducks in every direction with no alignment.

Alignment starts with principles. And let’s pause to align on what principles actually mean (yes, there’s a lot of alignment going on here 😅).

Principles are the philosophy your team practices to bring alignment to how strategy is delivered. They make the intangible, tangible. They explain why we do things a certain way, the trade-offs we’re willing to make and the assumptions we’ll carry. 

Before you start designing promotion processes, you need to anchor on principles. Principles give you the why. And once you’ve agreed the why, then you can build the how.

Agree on promotion principles with execs

When I built our promotion process, the first step wasn’t a template. It was alignment with the exec team on principles.

This took longer than building the process itself — because this is the real challenge:

(Spoiler: once we had alignment, building the process was quick. Embedding it was smooth, too — because we weren’t constantly stopping to disagree as a result of unspoken assumptions.)

Here’s an example from one of my companies:

👉 Why this matters: It makes clear that promotions are based on the development of future capabilities, not just today’s capabilities.

👉 Why this matters: It sets the expectation that readiness takes time, and is not a one-off project or lucky quarter.

👉 Why this matters: It shows ambition must meet business reality. The company invests in development, but can’t guarantee roles that don’t exist.

👉 Why this matters: Because once the role spans across teams/functions, it requires cross-functional visibility and endorsement.

👉 Why this matters: It holds all leaders accountable for developing people, not hiding behind “the system.”

From principles into process

Once we aligned on principles, we built out the promotion process — and every step of it tied directly back to those principles.

Below is a sample from our “career moves” pitch deck (which includes promotion). It guided managers to capture the right insights for decision-making.

When managers put forward their people for promotion, they provided evidence aligned to the principles:

🌱 Evidence of development — consistent behavioural examples tied to the next role (e.g. career maps) and company values

🔢 Evidence from multiple sources — tangible examples observed by others and measurable results from projects or team performance

⌛ Evidence of consistency — sustained behaviours over time (not a one-hit wonder!)

And that’s the key: once principles are clear, process becomes straightforward.

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