Update: Working on getting a promotion for two reports, what’s a better strategy?
A few months back I asked for advice here on how I should go about getting 2 of my reports promoted at the same time (original post), not expecting much success, but trying anyway. And I just wanted to update y'all that I finally did it!
It was a... journey, starting with me hijacking my own annual review to force a discussion with my elusive boss about my team to get her on board, then strategically using the crunch time caused by another department's lack of organization to showcase our efficiency (we're the last step before things become customer-facing, so if we didn't commit miracles, Sales would have had nothing to show). Also at some point our CEO came down to "get a read on the situation", and I let my people speak for themselves, and they impressed him a lot, apparently, so that probably also helped.
Normally my team "just makes things work out" and because we're so specialized, no one really understands how much technical and strategical skill is needed, and I had to become kind of a little bit inconvenient to get the right people to notice and appreciate what we do, which was so far out of my comfort zone.
It was a more stressful process than I anticipated, because (shockingly) the HR took an issue with the "senior" in the job title (even though when a man was in that position doing literally the same thing, it was fine).
After a lot of back and forth I ended up rewriting everyone's job descriptions (which, you know what, was a good thing anyway and needed to be updated at some point), and my manager came up with a different title that kept "associate" in the name but sounds more er, respectable, I guess? And I still managed to get them salaries that were on par with their expectations, and a set-in-stone review in 6 months with the possible additional raise if their performance warrants it.
So, my team is currently riding a high, I got approved for 2 whole interns for the summer (I literally only need one, I don't know if they felt I'd appreciate more??), and I am getting some equipment upgraded while the bosses are impressed with us. I cannot believe I managed to make it happen with everything that's going on in the world. I think if I let myself wait till things got better, it would not have worked - the offers went out just before the Iran thing started.
I'm not sure of the etiquette here, but I really wanted to thank u/Mundane-Anybody-8290 for the excellent suggestion on how I should frame the proposal (that it was a question of how they should spend the money, not if ) - I kind of built my whole proposal around that thought, and also it gave me the idea to pull historic data to show that previously (with a different roster), we did indeed need more people to be able to keep things running, so it wasn't just speculation on my part. Also, thank you to the many people who validated my gut feeling that if I picked one person over the other (instead of pushing for both), it would really mess up the team dynamic and make whoever got passed up mentally check out.