Building a better ladder
The key to rolling out effective career matrixes is to base them on impact rather than knowledge or skills. Modeling the behaviors that lead to success is the key to helping your team develop their careers.
Introduction
In the last few years the design community has caught on to the value of career matrixes (a.k.a job ladders). Ensuring both clarity and transparency not only for the design team’s performance, but when you focus them on impact they provide a clear description of what design delivers to rest of the organization.
What is a Career Matrix
While they go by different names; ladders, frameworks, matrixes, etc. they all share the common objective of providing guidance for career development. Providing employees with a roadmap for progressing their careers and frequently include requirements for various skills, knowledge and even work products at the various levels of progression. They often include:
Job Levels / Titles – from junior through senior levels, these can also include management and executive levels
Experience & Education Requirements – it common for a matrix to include, educational requirement, years of experience, and even required certifications
Core Competencies – comprehensive set of the skills, knowledge, and behaviors expected at each level of the role.
Responsibilities – these include the various duties and deliverables
Performance Metrics & Expectations– establishes how success is measured at each stage including performance standards for each level.
Training & Development – more comprehensive frameworks will also include reference to learning resources, mentorship programs, or on-the-job training opportunities.
In their simplest form, a career matrix is a table with one axis showing the job levels—which vary based on the size of your team, while the other axis lists the various requirements, competencies and responsibilities.
Is your matrix set up for success?
While the two axes are pretty straightforward, there are different schools of thought for filling in performance metrics and expectations in corresponding cells of the table. Some choose a simple binary; you have that competency or you don’t. Even if there is a description of the competency or responsibility, these checkmark matrixes provide little or no value when it comes to helping plan a career path.
Again, keep in mind the goal of a career matrix is to align everyone’s expectations about what is required to progress up to the next level. A checkmark falls far short of being able to justify a promotion. And there is difference between a checkmark and delivering value.
Regardless of what you believe about the people on your team and their accomplishments, when it comes to promotions the only thing that matters is what they have done to benefit the company.
A showing they received a checkmark will not cut it with your promotions committee.
It takes time to help grow and develop people, to ensure they reach their full potential. A career matrix is a direct measure of a manager’s commitment to their team. Taking the time to write a comprehensive career matrix based on impact and value creation means that manager has made the investment in their team’s success. Clearly articulating the requirements for advancing to next level not only helps plan advancements but also provides context for mentoring and personal development.
Start by describing the competencies and responsibilities in the same way you would write up a promotion request. That is imagine you are describing the impact, outcomes and value the person created, and how their efforts delivered success.
Let’s look at an example. Let’s compare the description for a L2 Designer and a L3 Designer in the area of Execution/Delivery
L2 Designer:
Operates independently but with regular check-in with manager/leadership. Driving well-scoped design tasks, you may require help to get things done. You drive your own personal learning. Translates product requirements into workflows, wireframes and detailed mock-ups. Pays attention to the details, ensuring the accuracy and comprehensiveness of their designs.
L3 Designer
Operates with minimal supervision. Responsible for multiple large and medium sized projects, including the overall design direction. You are able to unblock yourself to drive projects to completion through research, experimentation, or seeking advice from others. You have a bias toward learning and taking action and know when to focus on each. Strong execution on your projects. Ensures that designs are feasible, viable and desirable.
There is a natural progression between the two levels. With clear distinctions in both the what is expected for success, and the scope of their work, as well as setting up the impact they are expected to deliver. It is easy to use these description in conjunction with the individual work deliverables to frame up their accomplishments and the impact they have on the team and ideally the business.
The further up you go the concept of execution expands. For example at the Principal Designer level for Execution:
L6 Designer
You inspire autonomy in others by helping them unblock themselves and providing them with tools and techniques to unblock themselves. Responsible for core, mission critical products, including their long-term strategic design direction. You prioritize time-to-value effectively, thoughtfully question assumptions, and successfully guide discussion of tradeoffs in a way that meaningfully influences the direction of major work. You are responsible for the user experience of multiple products/solutions.
Both the designer and manager are able to use these behavioral descriptions to frame their conversations about the individual’s performance, as well as the manager’s. For example, if the manager did not prioritize time to have regular check-ins with their L2 designer, or failed to provide their L3 large and challenging projects, these richer description help to facilitate mutually beneficial conversations. This approach can show both mutual successes and areas for mutual development. Most importantly it provides a clear way for the individual and manager to frame the work in the context of business value.
Clear, actionable descriptions help everyone understand what is expected of their performance, this is especially true for driving impact. For most designers, impact is not part of their career planning. Calling out the central role impact plays when considering a promotion will help ensure the people on your design team will strive to deliver business value.
Focusing on the outcome
No one is entitled to a promotion; Promotions are earned by delivering value to the company. In order to best support your team, it’s important to provide transparency about their career path within your organization.
Work with your leadership and peers to ensure you have their support for what is required to move people forward within the organization. And build your career matrix around those expectations. By aligning everyone in the decision making process—your team, peers, human resources, and company leadership, you will not only make the process flow smoother it will also remove any ambiguity when assessing promotions. The easiest promotions are the ones that are self-evident to all the stakeholders.
NOTE: The choice of competencies should include skills associated with the profession but they should also clearly reflect those capabilities the executive team takes into consideration when evaluating promotions.
Executive don’t care about someone’s ability gain knowledge or acquire new skills. Executives care about impact. By highlighting how to add value, you provide greater alignment and transparency to everyone on your team.
A secondary benefit for this approach to setting clear expectations across the organization for not only what your team will contribute and why, but also what expect in regards to your teams’ outputs. Providing the rest of the organization with clarity about what you team will deliver, and what they will contribute in identifying, prioritizing, and solving problems, sets your team up for greater success.
Building a stronger team
This approach does more than remove subjectively in performance reviews, or give people a clear path toward reaching their career objectives. Combining the assessments from your entire organization gives you a clear overview of your team’s ability to achieve success and deliver value to your customers and the business.
A single team member can clearly see when they are lacking in a particular area, helping you to prioritize their project work, as well as personal development and training. Additionally you can better align a person’s development objectives with a peer who can mentor them, ensuring they can make meaningful progress without being overwhelmed.
An individual team member’s assessment showing areas for potential development
An overview of a team’s assessment showing clear gaps in Knowledge & Skills, while also identifying potential mentors within the team
Patterns begin to emerge when you combined the assessments from your entire team. Patterns can identify critical gaps allowing you to:
Make intelligent and objective adjustments in your hiring plans.
Prioritize team training and development. Note: if you share competencies in common with other teams, you collaborate on training programs,
Identify potential mentors to work with your team members to their develop competencies.
Design your interviews to screen for those competencies that deliver the greatest value to your team and the company.
The matrix can also be used to on-board for new hires introducing them to the areas that are critical to their success
Generic v. Tailored.
The culture of the organization you are working in today is different from your last company, and it will be different from your next company as well. Rather than simply copy and paste another organization’s career ladder, you need to work with your peers across your organization, as well; as your manager and their peers, as well as your human resources team, to develop a matrix that reflects both your profession as well as the culture of your organization.
Tying in the organization’s values and paying special attention to what your leadership takes into consideration when determining a promotion, it is important to make sure both the competencies, and the corresponding outcomes accurately reflect what it will take for people to move forward on their career path.
During this process you will likely discover some of the competencies you consider core to your profession may not be part of your leadership’s thinking in determining promotions. Don’t freak out, this is a good thing. This will help you create a prioritized roadmap for working with your leadership to help them better understand the value design brings to the table. And you can also coach your team to more effectively communicate their work and its value to their peers and management throughout the company.
As I mentioned early, remember the career matrix is different from professional development. While some team members may feel it is important to acknowledge their skill levels with particular tools, software packages or processes, rather expand the matrix with skills—some of which may not apply to everyone on your team, it is more effective to create a single professional development category. This will ensure your people understand that you and the company have a vested interest in professional development with their participation in courses, conferences, tutorials, etc.
Is your matrix objective?
Most of life’s disappointment can be attributed to a mismatch in expectations.
Being able to have a clear set of shared expectations for job performance means everyone on the team can be evaluated equally. More importantly based on how you manage the review process you can ensure that all the members are also assessed objectively based on their opportunities and their response in delivering value to the business.
Imagine you have multiple first level managers in your design organization, each is responsible for assessing their team’s performance. With only a simple check box to go by or a short description, can you expect each of your managers to share a common understanding for what it means to perform at a Designer verses a Senior Designer level? The less comprehensive the description, the easier for people to get unintentionally tripped up by their own biases—recency, personal, and hindsight biases all spring to mind. Or worse; for managers to play favorites,
Writing out a short description of what success looks like for each of the competencies will help remove bias. Additionally if the descriptions include the impact expected with each subsequent level of the competency, you will provide not only a clear means of assessment but also clear path for development.
The descriptions for each competency should not leave room for interpretation; they should focus on outcomes, what is what means to have effectively done the job. Additionally, the description should follow a progressive path the corresponds to the career level. Each subsequent level should build on the previous ones, it is after a ladder for growth.
Career matrixes alone cannot ensure complete objectivity in the management of a team but it can provide a clear framework for discussing concerns around bias or the lack of equity.
Summary
A career matrix is not just an internal tool to be used by the design team, it should serve as an external description for your team’s contribution to the organization. A well crafted career matrix establishes the scope and expectations for the job family making it clear other teams in your company what they should expect from the people on your team. Sharing your team’s career matrix with product management, marketing, engineering, etc. will let them know how you are expecting your team to contribute, providing leadership, strategic direction, etc.
Taken collectively, a full set of these matrixes gives the company leadership clarity about where the various teams are at and how the organization needs to evolve as a whole. Over time these matrixes can provide greater insights to how the company is operating, what it really values, and where it needs to focus in order to achieve its long term growth and revenue objectives.
For an complete version of my Career Matrix please reach to me on LinkedIn, or send an email to info at matthewholloway.com
Example Competency: Influence
Below is an example from the competency matrix I have developed for my current company. This is one of 10 competencies necessary for the design team. Sets clear expectations for everyone about what outcomes and impacts are expected at each level of a designer’s career development.
It is important to keep in mind that each company’s needs are unique in regards to the various professional competencies. It is therefor important to not apply a prescriptive set of competencies and outputs but to tailor them to your company’s specific needs.
Designer: Can tie basic knots. Shown complex knots
Working with well defined problems and outcomes, can develop clear cohesive plans of action for developing the solution. Will occasionally need guidance from manager/peers to explore edge cases within plan or implementation approach.
Senior Designer: Calculates rope strength. Knows a lot about knots
Working within established strategies, identifies problems and defines outcomes. Trusted with more autonomy to explore means of increasing our customer value. Seeks direction as needed. Triangulates work against larger business objectives. Is not afraid to ask questions, effectively synthesizing insights and communicating plans to the larger organization.
Usually handles risk, change, and uncertainty within their personal scope of work effectively. Usually decides and acts responsibly without having the total picture during routine business, and when in high pressure situations.
Lead Design: Understands rope making. Can tie any knot you can think of
Confident in taking risks building toward long-term business objectives. Has the ability to make a decision and move forward. Strong situational awareness, connecting adjacent and analogous patterns. Demonstrates ability to plan for the future, while remaining grounded in the present. Quickly identifies mistakes and makes appropriate course corrections.
Effectively handles risk, change, and uncertainty across several teams. Decides and acts responsibly in their work across teams without having the total picture during routine business, as well as when in high pressure situations.
Principal Designer: Knows more about rope than you ever will. Capable of creating new knots
May not even know what the problem is before starting. Delivers business success with complete independence. Seeks out others to help clarify; pushing boundaries, challenging assumptions.
Proactively mitigates risks before they can have an adverse effect on the team or product. Directs others within the organization, ensuring they act responsibly. Successfully applies their experience and wisdom en lieu of having all the facts. Remains calm and level headed during high pressure situations.
Design Director: Developing what will come after rope. Knots are no longer necessary.
Goes out in the wild and discovers, scopes, and defines new products, strategic investments, and/or new customers. For new products or investments presents a clear business case to executive leadership, gaining cross-functional buy-in and support, defining the risks, impacts, and rewards.
Engaged by C-level executives to advise them on emerging situations. And if required doing the research, discovery, and analysis to gain buy-in and support for how to best address the concern.
Admittedly this approach initially takes longer to develop, and it requires authentic conversations with your team, but once you’ve made the initial investment it pays dividends every year. Companies using outcome based matrixes report employees have greater transparency into what is expected from them, greater engagement, and a more optimistic view of the organization and their opportunity for advancement. Managers report having a clear playbook for guiding their team’s professional development and career planning.
When combined with weekly 1:1’s and a practice of real-time feedback, team members can maintain a clear picture of where they are, where they are making progress, and the areas that still need to be addressed. It also give managers a clear focus on the material they should be supplying to their team to help them gain the skills and aptitudes for their development.
