Demand more

After an assessment you may have identified gaps in your ability, or areas where you should be progressing but aren’t. This is normal, and will be the same for everyone. Non-progression should not necessarily be looked upon as a failure, and oftentimes we’d expect it to be in part a result of a lack of opportunity to progress.

Take the complexity of work responsibility as an example. Progression in this requires the Developer to take on increasingly complex tasks, and needs to demonstrate a level of fluidity and trust in handling these tasks. Now if the Developer isn’t being given suitably complex tasks to work on they can’t well be expected to progress. This is where the Developer should be free to demand from their manager the opportunity to prove themselves at a higher level; they are allowed to demand from the manager that they be given more complex work - or anything that is missing from their role that prevents progress.

In this way the responsibility levels can act as a contract between Trade Me and the Developer. It outlines not only Trade Me’s expectations for the Developer, but also the types of challenges / opportunities that Trade Me is expected to be providing to the Developer. Developers can and should be able to call out instances where Trade Me is not meeting its side of the contract.

Now the ability to demand more responsibility is not necessarily a guarantee that more responsibility will be granted. The Developer may have previously demonstrated explicit unsuitability for higher levels of responsibility, or their manager may believe that they need more time to settle into current levels (both these examples indicate that the Developer has been progressed prematurely and shouldn’t really be at their current level btw). Whatever the reason there may be a legitimate reason as to why a Developer is not being trusted with increased responsibility, hopefully the framework helps with exposing the reason and allows a mutually agreed plan to mitigate it.