There is a moment—or many—in almost every leveling exercise where a leader leans back, crosses their arms, and says some version of the same thing: “That can’t be right. She’s one of my best people. There is no way she is not a Sr. Director.”
And they’re usually not wrong about that. The person is talented, reliable, and trusted. But talented, reliable, and trusted are not level definitions. Scope and impact are.
Welcome to Step 2, and where the first real resistance and distrust in the data shows up. In my experience this is the most time consuming and emotionally charged part of the process as biases are being challenged, and this is a natural response for leaders, not a signal that you are doing something wrong.
After you’ve defined your data sources in Step 1, the nextstep is to map every person in your organization to a level using the survey’s definitions—not your internal titles, not tenure, not how indispensable someone feels to their manager, and certainly not what was negotiated three years ago during a candidate-driven market when leaders were offering whatever it took to close a hire.
That last one is worth pausing on. In candidate-driven hiring markets, over-leveling is quite the norm. A leader wants to land a candidate, the title gets inflated to justify the comp, and suddenly you have a Director doing Manager-level work and a compensation structure with no honest foundation underneath it. Multiply that by dozens of hires across multiple years and you have exactly the kind of drift that makes leaders uneasy when they see the mapping results.
The survey definitions cut through all of that. They are anchored in scope: how broad is this person’s remit, their impact, and where does the work land if this person succeeds or fails. Those questions have a way of clarifying things that titles never do.
What I have seen when doing this work:
• Leaders want to peg their people as more senior than the definitions support. The “senior star player” who everyone relies on often maps to a mid-level individual contributor when you apply the actual criteria. This is not an
indictment of the person, rather an honest assessment of where they are operating today.
• The inverse also happens, which is equally worth probing. Sometimes you find someone who has been underestimated, under-leveled, and underpaid relative to the scope they’re carrying. While it is a different kind of problem, it is a
very important one to surface, as it often impacts women and underrepresented
groups.
When leaders push back—and they always do—I’ve found one reframe that tends to land: “They are exceptional at what they do, but per the survey definitions they are operating exceptionally at this level today. That doesn’t mean they can’t get to the next level if there is business need. If there’s room to develop them there, we can build a plan together. But we should not be in the business of inflation.” Do I suggest we downgrade their current pay? No, but there will need to be a solid
development plan in place to get them to level and to stabilize their pay over
time to get them closer to their true level peers in the event they don’t level up
in short order. This is also important that it be determined if the business really needs capability beyond what the team member currently has. Sometimes they don't, which introduces a different challenge.
The goal of this step isn’t to diminish anyone. It’s to build a foundation honest enough to hold up. We want a foundation where levels mean something, pay decisions are defensible, and your people have a clear picture of where they stand and what it takes to grow. It is also the first real step toward pay parity. If your levels are inflated, everything built on top of them will be too.
Next up: Step 3—job family matching, which can alsopresent its own challenges, but nothing that is insurmountable with a little bit of patience, listening, and collaboration.
Photo by Christina Morillo.