The 7 Characteristics of Top Promotion Candidates

I’ve promoted hundreds of people over the years and the diversity of talent in the market never ceases to amaze me. Thankfully the days of just promoting people with a top university degree and the ‘right background’ are long gone. Organisations have woken up to the fact that for them to succeed in the hyper competitive marketplace that the world is today, they need people with more about them.

This topic led me to a really interesting series of conversations with a number of fellow partners at my consulting firm. I wanted to develop a consensus on just what are the characteristics that we most commonly see in top promotion candidates? As you can imagine, lots of ideas came up and a number of different things were mentioned, but fairly quickly the same characteristics started to come up again and again.

Interestingly these same characteristics were mentioned irrespective of service line or geography. From the UK, India, Germany, the US and Brazil – no matter who I spoke to, the partners in those territories said the same thing.

And when I started talking to my clients about my findings, they all agreed. Leaders in different sectors and in every size of organisation agreed that these characteristics were the most important when considering the people they wanted to promote.

There are of course basic qualifiers for promotion – being good at your job, meeting or preferably exceeding your performance metrics and having a business case, etc (although all of those things can be worked around). But those things aside, what are the common characteristics of the ‘top promotion candidates’ these days?

Here’s what we came up with:

1. Inquisitive

People who are inquisitive are interested in what is going on in the world around them. They’re always asking questions, meeting new people, reading up on topics. They want to understand and, importantly, their interests stretch beyond their own narrow field of expertise.

They put a real emphasis on their own self development and are constantly looking to learn new things. These are the people that will challenge the status quo and are genuinely on the look out to improve everything they are involved in.

2. ….. *

* Premium content – I’ve curated the rest of this valuable blog into a handy, downloadable booklet. The insight is incredible – where else would you get a consensus view from so many industry leaders on what they are all looking for in promotion candidates?

Download your free copy here.