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

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

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?.