Most of us know that we need to do some work on our self-development. However, quantifying that can be hard. It is often easy to say where you want to be, but less easy to see what needs to change for you to reach that point.
One tool that you may find useful is the Promotability Index. The brainchild of Amii Barnard-Bahn, it distils her 20+ years of experience working with and serving as a C-suite executive in Global Fortune 50 companies.
The exercise helps individuals understand their level of promotability: how likely they are to be promoted to a leadership position within their chosen career or organisation. It can therefore help you to assess where you are within your career, set personal goals, and then track progress towards them.
Understanding promotability
The Promotability Index is split into five categories, to enable self-assessment. The categories are Self-Awareness, External Awareness, Strategic Thinking, Executive Presence, and Thought Leadership. Each section contains a number of self-assessment questions, which range from how you handle conflict and mistakes through to how you interact with your peers and dress for work.
Once you have completed the questionnaire, you will get your results as a score reflecting your career stage. A score of 1–40 means you are in the exploration stage of your career. Getting 41–65 means you are establishing your career and have made progress. but still have room to grow. Finally, 66–82 means you are moving up the career ladder and making good progress.
Using the Index
Fundamentally, the Index is about how close you are to a leadership position, rather than simply the next step of your career. However, it may provide useful points about areas of development. In particular, it shows which areas may need more work, and what aspects you should consider.
You can use the evaluation tool for free, and re-assess yourself periodically. Once a year seems reasonable, but you may prefer to do it more often if you feel that you are changing rapidly.
The Promotability Index is going to change as you go through the different stages of your career, and as you move within your company. It is best considered as a contribution to your development planning, rather than a complete blueprint for the future. You might say that it suggests areas for work or development, but it is up to you to decide what changes you want to make within your career.
The big advantage of the Promotability Index is that it is quick and easy to use. It is laid out in a way that is easy to digest and it only takes a few minutes to complete. It provides easily accessible and digestible information and you can retake it as many times as you like to see if you can show improvement and find new areas of development to work on.
The creators of the Promotability Index also offer a paid guidebook. This goes deeper into the meaning of your score, and what you can do to improve. The guidebook also has additional quizzes and activities to help you explore where you are within your career and how you can make changes.
Your score is personal
Everyone’s career journey is different. Your score may therefore not simply go upwards as your skills develop. You might instead make some lateral moves as a way to learn new skills that will enable you to move up within the company later. The point of the Promotability Index is not that you need to ‘win’ by getting the highest score possible. Instead, it is about highlighting areas that you might want to develop in future, to make yourself more promotable.
It is therefore designed to improve your understanding of where you stand and what skills you bring to the table. Once you have this, you can set your personal career goals for the next few months or years—and then start to make changes.
The bottom line, therefore, is that this is a potentially useful tool that may help you to track your career and self-development. Why not try it, and let us know how you get on?