At a recent CWIT meetup, we were lucky to have Jess Mink, Director of Engineering at Auth0, talk about performance and compensation in the tech industry. She highlighted the importance of transparency in the process for both managers and employees.

Whether your company is big or small, Jess’s insights about using career ladders and salary bands are helpful for anyone thinking about compensation and inspiring a team's best performance. Creating a level ground allows reviews and promotions to be based on clear expectations and performance metrics.

How to give great feedback. As managers, we don’t want to be vague and unhelpful. And as employees we fundamentally want to know where we stand. We want feedback that’s clear, actionable, and has consistent standards across individuals and managers.

Career ladders are one way of accomplishing this. A career ladder is a list of behaviors and outcomes that is organized thematically and by level.

The goals of using a career ladder include:

• Have a conversation
• ​Identify goals to work on together
• Don’t go back over stuff that’s already been highlighted too much (once a quarter)
• Building a shared understanding of what the next level looks like
• Play to people’s strengths 
• Use other 1:1s to talk about dreams and work on goals

One reason in particular It’s really useful to get to a point of shared understanding is salary: if an employee finds out she is being paid significantly less for roughly the same job level, you are going to lose her trust. 

How can you avoid being that jerk? We’ve already discussed how to build a shared understanding of performance. Now we’ve just got to map it to actual dollar amounts. Set levels of salary for each job description based on research of similar jobs for your local market. Ask HR for these amounts so you have a good point of reference.

Key points: 

• Newly promoted people should start near the bottom of a band
• Bands should overlap
• Raises might be small on promotion, but employees now know they’ve got lots more space to push for raises

You might not be able to start here if people are incorrectly leveled. Make a plan to get there. It will make your life much easier. If you have a geographically distributed team, ensure managers have a way to see pay bands for all locations and ensure that independent contractors can see the pay band for their location.

Put it all together. Once you have a better understanding of these resources, put them to good use.

• Conduct routine growth conversations
• Re-highlight the career ladder once a quarter for places that need work or are being accomplished well
• Adjust for the confidence level of each employee
• Map these conversations and growth goals into the salary bands

My company doesn’t have a ladder. Here are some steps to help your company create its own career ladder.

• Define the major themes
• Brainstorm with other managers
• Color-code the levels 
• Reword as needed
• Test it out
• Refine after testing
• Define your levels
• Launch the ladder

Make sure you have the budget to re-level people where needed. And be willing to take people down a level if need be — it isn’t doing anyone any favors if you’re setting them up to underperform. This doesn’t have to mean paying someone less, but it might mean they wait a longer period for their next salary increase.

What makes a good career ladder? In Jess’ experience, a successful career ladder meets these guidelines:

• Reflects reality
• Includes a mix of behaviors and outcomes
• Clarifies performance metrics
• Indicates when an employee arrives at the next level
• Promotes employees when they’ve reached 80-90% of their current level and 25-50% of a new level

Hack your corporate culture. The bonus of a career ladder is that it can be the single biggest influence you have on company culture. While you’re building out performance descriptions for each level, you can include requirements like, “Does not condescend to others or give the impression they think other people are less capable than they are. Defaults to assuming that other people’s knowledge is advanced and is reasonable…” or “Hires and retains a diverse team…”

Help create the corporate culture you want to see.

Summary by Trae Turner. This article includes excerpts from Jess Mink’s presentation, “Let’s talk about money.” View her complete slides.