Career Development: What It Means to Be a Manager, Director, or VP (2015)

It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of big-company HR practices. I’m more of the First Break all the Rules type. Despite my general skepticism of many standard practices, we still do annual performance reviews at my company, though I’m thinking seriously of dropping them. (See Get Rid of the Performance Review.) Another practice I’m not hugely fond of is “leveling” — the creation of a set of granular levels to classify jobs across the organization. Leveling typically results in something that looks like this: While I am a huge fan of compensation benchmarking (i.e., figuring out what someone is worth in the market before they do by getting another job), I think classical leveling has a number of problems: It’s futile to level across functions. Yes, you might discover that a Senior FPA Analyst II earns the same as a Product Marketing Director I, but why does that matter? It’s a coincidence. It’s like saying with $3.65 I can buy either a grande non-fat latte or a head of organic lettuce ... Read full article.