Skill mastery: How do you know when you’re there?

The worst: You go into your performance review feeling on fire, you’re handling all your projects, you’re leveling up in new ways, and you’re ready for that promotion. Then your boss disagrees.

“I think you need more work in this area before we make it official.”

This… one area? or this area: *gestures vaguely toward everything the light touches*

If they can’t be specific, you might be in a situation where your manager is trying to extend the time you’re willing to do the work for free for as long as possible.

Protect yourself from job scope creep

Your career leveling documentation likely depends on "skill mastery" or task mastery in order to determine that you're ready to “own” a task or level up on it.

But... do you get the promotion as soon as you start the new role’s responsibilities, or do you get it after you’ve already been doing it for a while?

Your leadership may actually use this ambiguousness to deny you promotions or raises, kicking the can down a foggy road that’s hard to see ahead.

There is a long distance between a situation where you’re ready for new responsibilities (performing all of your job and maybe a little bit of the next level), and one where you are already performing most of the tasks of the next level.

Don’t let that happen, by constantly discussing what’s on your plate and how you’re progressing with your manager in your 1:1. Be prepared to evaluate your own skills against the rubric here, and the rubric your company provides. If you’re certain where you’d be graded for all of your current tasks, then you have a data-driven basis to negotiate with your manager a little more assertively.

What does mastery mean?

I built this little list of journey steps to illustrate that mastery means layering on more capabilities until you reach ownership:

1. You can follow a training document and standard process to learn a task.

2. You can do the task without help to 99% accuracy, consistently.

3. You can manage many of these tasks in a project to hit a deadline or goal.

4. You can train others to also complete the task.

5. You can manage bigger and more complex versions of the project, including manage others who join to help on the project.

6. You can communicate the context, progress, results, and impact to others.

7. You can troubleshoot issues and reach out to the right people for help when needed.

8. You "own" the area of responsibility and are assigned in RASCI or OKRs.

9. You've been on at least 12 marketing podcasts about it with a pun name like "up and to the rizz"

What else would you add or what order would you change?

For managers

A blind grading exercise which is quantitative or subjective (you don’t have to use actual scores if that makes you uncomfortable) can reveal areas where you do and don’t align on your employee’s skills. This allows you to come together and agree on what mastery means, and what specifically must be done by when, to expand their responsibility.