Template for Levelling Up
- This doc is helpful to align expectations with your manager on what behaviors have been / still need to be showcased inorder for you to level up. You could use this process to evaluate if a promotion might be around the corner and track one’s personal progress in an ongoing way too.
- The most important aspect is to ensure that your manager fills up “Is this behaviour showcased?” her/himself. You could take the approach of filling it for her/him and getting a nod but ensure that you get a complete buy-in.
Note: This is a template and the table filled below has hypothetical examples.
| Tracks | Behaviours* for (Current level+1) | Is the behaviour showcased? | Supported Evidence | Comments from manager |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Leadership | Is an active contributor to improve recruitment processes | Yes | Rehauled the interview case studies for business function in collaboration with the recruitment team. This has resulted in a much more streamlined hiring process reducing the time of review taken by the panel from 5 days to 3 days. | Well done |
| Leadership | Mentors other people in the business team | No | [To do] Guide member-A and member-B on how to gain a certain skillset | |
| Leadership | Develops processes and programs to solve organizational problems | No | [To do] Work with XYZ team to deliver an organizational change management project | |
| Communication | Delivers presentations in town halls and big public forums | Yes | Delivered a presentation to showcase the team’s work on XYZ and got great feedback from ABC teams. ABC teams understand our work better now and have identified some common themes to collaborate with them on. | |
| Communication | Communicates complex ideas skillfully and with nuance, and establishes alignment within the wider organization | Yes | Drives the following cadences: • Weekly cadence with XYZ team to focus on a certain ABC topic with the objective to accomplish KR 1.1. • Monthly cadence with ABC, XYZ teams for alignment on supply utilisation. |
|
| More dimensions | … |
*Behaviours are ideally a part of the company’s established job ladder. Check a sample of how Medium’s engineering team has built theirs for L1 to L5.
For supported evidence, please note:
- Focus on what you individually did (and not the team) and what results were achieved from those actions.
- Back this up with data and more concrete details. Eg: If you are talking about a project which helped increase supply utilization, add snapshots of the last 3 months of the dashboards which clearly shows the numbers going up from x% to y%.
- If the results haven’t been realised yet, you could add some proxy leading indicators to those results.
- If proxy data is not available, at the least add acknowledgement / appreciation from stakeholders on the initiative itself. Eg: Snapshot of slack / email where the Driver Ops head appreciated you directly on the conduct of the project. Ask for some feedback from these stakeholders if you don’t yet know how these projects went and what you could have done better.
Relevant Reads:
- Brag (a lil): This may not come naturally to you (as is the case with me) and a good approach is to maintain a doc which you fill as and when you do tasks which are worth mentioning. Read more on brag doc here.
- Know where you are to identify the gaps - PM Skills.