Self-paced course · CHF 395 · opening soon
How the decision to promote you actually gets made, who is in the room when it happens, and what to do in the months before it rather than in the weeks after.
It opens with a number.
The pool is sized before a single person is discussed. Somebody says how many promotions there are this cycle, and only then does anyone start talking about who. By the time your name comes up, the shape of the answer already exists.
The second thing nobody tells you is what you are being compared against. Not the criteria. The criteria are the language the conversation is conducted in. You are being ranked against the other people in the set, and the set was drawn up by somebody else.
Which makes your delivery the entry ticket. It gets you into the comparison and no further.
That is the part that catches senior people out, and it catches the strongest performers hardest. They have spent three years being told their delivery is excellent, and it is, and it is also the thing everybody else in the pool has. Being undeniable on the axis where everyone is undeniable does not move you.
I was Head of Technology HR at Credit Suisse. Then technology reward at UBS, during the integration, running the full technology reward cycle across a function of 24,000 people. I sat in the calibration meetings where these sets were drawn and these rankings argued. I did not own those decisions and I did not decide who went up. I advised, and I watched how it was really settled, which is a different and more useful thing to know.
These are the four patterns that show up most often, and all four are the behaviour of a conscientious person.
It opens with an assessment, because the honest answer to whether this is worth another year has to come before any work on how to win it. Six questions, three possible readings, and they are written out in full so you can run it yourself in ten minutes.
First
Whether the route to the next level where you are is open, conditional, or closed. Conditional is the most common answer and the most useful, because it names the specific condition rather than leaving you working on everything at once.
A closed reading is the course doing the one thing nobody around you will do, and it routes you somewhere better.
Step one
The months before the decision, which is the only period where anything you do still changes the outcome. How the cycle in your organisation actually runs and when the real decisions get taken, which is rarely when the calendar says.
Who needs to be able to speak about you when you are not there, and what they need to have seen. Then the evidence habit itself: four fields, fifteen minutes, once a week, which is the single highest-return thing in the course and the one most people skip.
Step two
An internal promotion is the worst-paid way to move up a level. The organisation knows your current number, knows you are unlikely to leave over a percentage, and knows that after a long runway the offer arrives feeling like a finish line rather than an opening position.
So: the level, the title and the package as three separate things. Where your leverage actually sits, inside and outside. And the difference between a title and the mandate that is supposed to come with it, which is worth establishing before you accept rather than after.
A title without the mandate is a holding pattern with better stationery. The terms module exists because this is the most common bad outcome at senior level, and it is entirely avoidable by asking two questions at the right moment.
Three people, and for two of them there is a better answer.
Promotion criteria, cycle timing and calibration practice vary by organisation, by function and by country. This course helps you read your own system and ask better questions inside it. It is not a description of how your employer works, and it does not tell you what you are entitled to.
I am a chartered management accountant. I am not a lawyer, I am not a tax adviser and I am not a financial adviser. Where a question turns on your contract, your equity or your immigration status, the course says so and tells you to take it to somebody qualified in your jurisdiction.
One thing the course is firm about throughout. Watch the pattern, and never build a case about a colleague. It is bad practice, it is usually visible, and in a calibration room it damages the person making it rather than the person it is about.
Self-paced and yours to keep, once it is live. The assessment comes first, and if it tells you the path is closed you will have got your money's worth in the first ten minutes, which is an odd thing to advertise and a true one.
Opening soon
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If it is one conversation rather than a cycle. Somebody has offered you the step up and you need to decide, or you have one meeting coming and want to get it right. A Decision Call is CHF 550 for sixty minutes on that one situation, with written observations afterwards. Take the hour rather than the course.