How to Know Which Team Members to Promote and When

Promotions are an important part of any workplace. Not only do they help reward members of your team, but it also encourages other team members who need to improve to step up. 

Understanding how and who to reward isn’t always easy, especially whilst keeping everyone motivated and happy. Each decision you make to acknowledge and promote an employee will have a knock-on effect on the rest of the team.​

How to Assess Who is Worthy of a Promotion

When you are considering promotions within your team, it goes without saying that it is important to consider how that promotion might affect the broader workplace dynamics.

Often it’s the most vocal or “present” members of your team that are rewarded. In a lot of cases, that’s fine. Employees who demonstrate initiative and know-how to communicate confidently can be great assets.

However, sometimes the quieter, less assertive employees are doing the better job; they are just less vocal about it and simply get on with their tasks. So, it’s worth considering this when you’re identifying who to promote and why.

“It’s a good idea to cast the internal net a little wider than you might think to look at each team member individually and assess their worthiness of a promotion. That way you can consider less obvious candidates and not just those who are more top-of-mind because they’ve been more assertive or extroverted​” says John Marx, Director of Halliday Marx.

Who is the Right Candidate to Promote?

Before you begin to shortlist who you should promote and whether they’re suitable, make sure that you have a comprehensive job description of what you want the new role to be or what it currently is if it’s an existing role that has become vacant. That way you can use it as a framework to determine which of your team members would be most appropriate for that role.

Outline all the responsibilities associated with the role as well as the personal characteristics and skills a successful applicant will need to have to be successful in the position. Unless it is a title promotion you should expect that there will be some degree of training involved because the person will be moving from their current role to a new role, and so that will also need to be considered when assessing the possibilities. 

With the job description in hand, you can then start to evaluate candidates for the specific job promotion to build up a clearer guide as to who would be best for the role.​

Take Notes of Wins and Weaknesses

“We can all be guilty of allowing their performance over the most recent couple of weeks to cloud our judgement rather than looking at the previous 12 months. When considering candidates for a promotion, it might only be the most recent successes (or failures) that come to mind, and you may not remember past achievements. It is your responsibility as a manager to keep notes on each team member’s successes and areas for improvement – just like you would for their annual review. Just a word or sentence will be enough to trigger the memory. It’s a great way of evaluating your team” says Andy Halliday, Director of Halliday Marx.  

Title, salary, or responsibility?

Each team member will have a different way of measuring their success. It might be an increase in pay, greater responsibility, or simply a better title. It’s always good to know these things before you enter into promotion discussions, that way you can make sure your team feels valued, recognised, and appreciated even if they don’t get the promotion. 

Performance evaluations and checklists

Your regular performance evaluations with your team members are a great way to answer a lot of the questions posed above. It also helps you to benchmark personal growth and development as well as guide your team as it sets out clearly defined roles and objectives. This also works well to measure how well they’ve done and where they might need improvement. A simple checklist can suffice to see how they measure against their KPIs. You can then update their checklist to follow as necessary moving forward.​

Working out who to promote and when isn’t easy, but with a few considerations, you can increase the likelihood of keeping your whole team happy, engaged, and performing well for your company.

At Halliday Marx, we know that working out who to promote and when isn’t easy, but with a few considerations, you can increase the likelihood of keeping your whole team happy, engaged, and performing well for your company. Keep the above tips in mind and you will be well set to identify which team members should be promoted and when.

If you would like any more advice on this topic, please contact us on 020 7096 8200 or email us at [email protected]

For the latest financial opportunities, company updates, recruitment information and career advice follow us on LinkedIn @HallidayMarx

Our philosophy is simple; Do things simply, do them well

​