People Management

Can you tell me about a situation in which you promoted someone within your team, and what steps you took to ensure a smooth transition?

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Expert Answer

Anonymous

a year ago
4.6Exceptional
As a leader I have had the opportunity to advocate for various promotions for my team members.
An example could be there was one EM in my team who was managing a business centric team.
As the team grew the scope and impact of the team also grew. This team was managing suite of products for conversion, referrals and payments.
Goals - In the 1:1 calls I had with the manager we both had agreed upon that the manager wants to continue in people management and grow
Culture fitment - This manager’s thought process and leadership style was aligned with the companies values of empathy, empowerment, customer success and others.
Impact - Manager drove various initiatives and projects to completion autonomously with team which contributed to the overall success of the business and company
Scaling the team and delegation -  Manager is ready to take on additional responsibilities as right processes were set where other members were already performing tasks which manager used to do.
Stakeholder management - Manager demonstrated collaboration skills in various situations which needed careful orchestration among stakeholders like product, support, design, and other horizontal engineering teams
Feedback - Feedback for this EM was positive from all the stakeholders and peers
Steps -
Expectation setting - Making sure that manager understands the scope of the role. Quoting the reasons why promotion is given.
Goals - defining goals, milestones, timelines
Development plan - Asked manager to go through a training to manage business stakeholders to learn the skills of collaborating with someone non technical. Additional metorship support from me
Team engagement and communication -  I facilitated open and transparent communication with the rest of the team to announce managers  promotion and explain the rationale behind the decision.
Continuous Feedback and Evaluation:
established a cadence of regular check-ins and feedback sessions with manager to monitor  progress, address any challenges or concerns, and provide ongoing support and guidance.

Anonymous

a year ago
4Strong
My philosphy to promote in my team, the team member should consistenly be performing at the next level already. At Auctane, once I identified the candidate to be promoted - I ensured that this employee is motivated and completing the tasks and take on stretch goals. - for e.g this employee was already doing sprint tasks but also mentoring others on the team.  Once I gathered enough data, I presented this to my manager and identified this person as a strong candidate for promotion backed up with the data.
Further, I made sure this team member had chance to show case thier stregths in org wide presentation etc. At Auctane, we have a leadership meeting where we discuss the candidate pool and who deserves a promotion - i brought this candidate name and presented the data - compared with thier peers. This helped me move this team member to higher level - she got promoted to a Senior SDE. 
  • Can you tell me about a situation in which you promoted someone within your team, and what steps you took to ensure a smooth transition?
  • How did you identify a team member who was ready for promotion?
  • What was your process for evaluating their qualifications and skillset?
  • What steps did you take to ensure a seamless transition for both the employee being promoted and the rest of the team?
  • Can you give an example of how you effectively communicated the promotion to the team and stakeholders?
  • How did you support the newly promoted team member in their new role?
  • Can you describe the outcome of the promotion and how it positively impacted the team?
  • Tell me about a time you helped a direct report get promoted? What was your role in the process and how did it go?
  • Tell me about a time you nominated a direct report for promotion? How did it work out?
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Interview question asked to Engineering Managers, Data Science Managers, ML Engineering Managers and other roles interviewing at Noon, LendingClub, Taiwan Semiconductor and others: Can you tell me about a situation in which you promoted someone within your team, and what steps you took to ensure a smooth transition?.