The one where we get a promotion

It is Thursday night, way past office hours and I am still in the library with a bottle of non-alcoholic champagne to celebrate my promotion to senior assistant manager of library, records and information services.

During my annual appraisal session last month with my manager I almost fell of my chair when he asked me whether it wasn’t time for a promotion. A manager suggesting me to get a promotion? Was this an alternate universe? Was I dreaming?

No, it was for real – he wanted me to get promoted. Not because I was doing such a fine job but being underpaid… nope. My boss himself was looking for a promotion, but he did not have enough staff reporting to him with the right pay grades. So in order to qualify for a promotion, my manager needed to promote the staff below him – logical.

Well, let’s promote the librarian to senior librarian. That sounds easy.

But Hades Corporation would not be the enormous, bureaucratic and inefficient organization it prides itself to be if they hadn’t installed a best practice worthy process to discourage staff from even THINKING about asking for a promotion. This all in line with the company finance manager’s slogan: the best cost saving is a cost not made at all.

The basis of the whole process is getting support from your manager. In my case, I was lucky – but if you can’t get along with your manager, you have no chance of a promotion ever. The rest of the promotion process is “employee driven”, i.e. you have to figure this out on your own with an application designed by a programmer who hates people.

The human resources department for once buried the hatchet with the IT department and invented the SYTYCGAP system (So You Think You Can Get A Promotion). This combines the best of both worlds: the meaningless corporate doublespeak of HR plus the plan, implement and forget mentality of the IT department.

First of all you need to check the competence requirements for your job. Right. The job of librarian was not in the system, as this job was never interesting enough to be formally described. The bad news was that I first had to create the competence requirements myself and then had them mystified by the human resources department. The good news is that I made sure the competence requirements were an exact match of my skills, knowledge and behaviors. When my job competence profile was “improved” by HR, it had 38 different items to fill out.

Secondly the competences consist of skills building blocks and skill building blocks are grouped according to the Hades Corporation Group Leadership Framework. If your head is not spinning by now and you can explain these concepts without laughing, you have passed step 2.

Last, but not least I had to provide evidence of the level of skills the system expected of me. You can’t just claim to have skill level 3b in “enabling an information management architecture”, “successfully embraces different values” or “effectively leverages information assets”.
No, you need someone in the organization to confirm your claim. This weeds out anybody in the organization who does not have friends, as nobody in their right mind would state something for someone else if there isn’t a benefit for them.

Luckily I have lots of friends on the organization and managers who owe me favors. In this case I thought it would be best to get an impressive friend to support my promotion.

Benjamin Chen is Hades Corporation’s Chief Chaos Officer. Nobody really knows what he does all day, but once every year he comes up with an idea or invention that makes the company enormous amounts of money. Besides being a reclusive inventor, he also is a pistol sharpshooter, speaks 14 languages and he plays the piano blindfolded with one hand while simultaneously solving Rubik’s cube with the other hand.

In general he does not attend meetings. When he does, he will be in the back of the room practicing his ninja skills and at the end of the meeting summarize the way forward with a thought provoking haiku like:

Bottom up, top down…
How to define a strategy?
We always debate

Or

A visionary
builds products for the future
but with no market

Benjamin is feared and respected by all, but also a very good friend of the library. He is notorious for never returning books, but is always a very good ally when the future of the library is at stake. So he was more than happy to write the following note:

”The librarian is a pivotal enabler of research and development at Hades Corporation. He is a highly skilled information guru who plays a key role in providing technical and scientific support to staff. He gears the service provided flexibly towards the requirements of the employee needing his service. Last but not least he is an adept and responsive provider of access to the complicated databases in our industry. Given the level of expertise, skill and versatility, I have no hesitation in recommending the librarian for a well deserved and overdue promotion.”

And with that my promotion application form was complete. Of course the HR cycle took various levels of approval, rubber-stamping, authorizing and filing before it was final. But at least now I get pay 2 bucks more per hour! (before taxes).


Disclaimer: this post and all others are the product of the authors' imagination and any resemblance to real situations is purely bad luck. This article does not reflect the thoughts or opinions of either myself, my company, my friends, or my alter ago. Do not fold, spindle or mutilate. Not designed or intended for use in on-line control of aircraft, air traffic, aircraft navigation or aircraft communications; or in the design, construction, operation or maintenance of any nuclear facility.