What factors influence your decision to promote a colleague in your team?

During a promotion evaluation I evaluate the leadership and core-competency capabilities of the candidate and how the capabilities were used to make an impact in their role. The capabilities and impact must meet the criteria set for the level or role that the candidate is being promoted to. 

To measure the core-competencies, I look at the speed, scope, complexity and quality of deliverables. For example: how much help did their code review requests require, how many iterations did their technical design take, What was the complexity of the project/artifact they delivered, how many stakeholders were involved in the project deliverable, how many colleagues did the candidate lead technically and how is the product/deliverable performing/scaling in field. These data points can be gathered very empirically and can be compared across candidates analytically. 

Leadership capability is equally or more important than the core-competencies when promoting a candidate. Measuring leadership capability and impact is harder than measuring core-competencies. This requires periodically gathering feedback from stakeholders, peers and through direct supervision. I analyze the data  for consistently displaying the required levels of leadership capability in and showing incremental improvements in their growth area. The other important data I look for is how the candidate is helping other leaders/peers/stakeholders grow in their roles and impact. 

There are multiple factors which will will be measured for a promotion:

a) Impact the collegue is making for the team/company.

b) Is the collegue setting a higher bar in efficiency

c) Are there bring any significant innovation - which allows us to deliver faster/better etc.

d) How are they promoting company culture 

At Auctane, I actively promoted my team mates when the demonstrated these above quality consistently and for multiple iterations. One Example I can give is prompting my Sr. Eng to Principal. She speher headed adoption of ELK stack which was new to our company, she quickly become an expert - wrote a wrapper - so other teams could quickly adopot to this new technology. The impact here was with her help - other teams could quickly ramp up (multiplier effect) and this behavior helped me to push her promotion as other EMs in the company already knew she deserved a promoption.

Promotion is a structured process. We approach is consistently from one review cycle to the next tracking readiness status and business fit:

1. Promo is lagging not leading: the person needs to be consistently showing comfort level operating at the next level. They should meet requirements at their current level and be demonstrating over 60% of requirements in the next level.

2. There is always a growth opportunity. We identify them , monitor them through review cycles, coach, and observe focus and results /improvments

3. There should be a business need to have next level of the person in the group. If our group does not have one, the person would need to seek  another group

I had experience promoting an engineer at G, we call her Erica. Erica was extremely strong technically. She took on projects and delivered large systems singlehandedly. Erica advocated internship project, hired intern, managed her and delivered a substantial project together. Erica's development area was cross team work. She was too attached to her own code and design ideas.

To address it we started measuring her cross-team work and reflect in our 1:1. At one point I had to deliver very tough feedback. I was able to coach Erica to see her collaboration from other's point of view. We even practiced it in the 1:1.

As Erica was willing to invest energy in addressing this she achieved significant improvement that led to peer's recognition, promo submission and approval.

I look for the following:

 - Consistent performance

 - Business domain knowledge and current gaps

 - Ability to lead a high visibility project end to end

 - Leading communication on requirements gathering and alignment with stakeholders and clients

Short answer would be impact and potential. Impact is how are they performing in their current role, what have they achieved so far, their brag buckets. Potential is what does the next level up would unlock for them, how will they handle additional responsibilities (and are they handling some already & to what extent?), does the organisation need/have vacancy on the next level up  

consistently meeting the expectation in the work that is assigned. 

very proactive and helps other team members after completing this tasks