The mantra we were fed as managers was that promotions were not an increase of scope or growth. Instead, they were a recognition of scope increases and growth that had already happened.
When my directs came to me wondering about a promotion, my response was always to figure out immediate increases in scope that we could implement. I told everyone that if they wanted a promotion, they should make my job in arguing for a promotion as easy as possible. I loved coming away from calibration meetings with multiple promotions since that let me throw most of my comp increases to non-promotions.
Not at all. I had lots of career talks with people that were much less focused on the immediate future. Things like figuring out whether an engineer was interested in moving towards architect, principle or management. I got one of my engineers a chance to try out working as a PM because we determined that he really enjoyed designing features more than coding. I helped one of our DevOps engineers realize that he really wanted to be doing product development and, unfortunately, we couldn't find him a role in our company so he ended up leaving. But even though we lost an engineer, I still had my manager's support to give that kind of guidance because we were doing right by the employee. And it also helped establish our reputation for caring about our employees development.
There's a lot more to career talks than just the immediate next step. There's also figuring out whether your current career trajectory is the one you really want. Performance review time is an excellent time to discuss taking the immediate next step, but it's a terrible time for the broader perspective meeting. That should be separate, but should still definitely happen.
When my directs came to me wondering about a promotion, my response was always to figure out immediate increases in scope that we could implement. I told everyone that if they wanted a promotion, they should make my job in arguing for a promotion as easy as possible. I loved coming away from calibration meetings with multiple promotions since that let me throw most of my comp increases to non-promotions.