Why Career Ladders Matter, Even for Teams of One

I became interim CMO right as the company was running its annual engagement survey. I was brought in to hold the fort while leadership hunted for a permanent replacement, which meant I inherited three functions: Creative, Content, Demand Gen. When the survey results came back, 40% of people across those teams said something close to this: “I don’t have a path forward.”

The easy call was to flag it for the permanent hire and move on. I didn’t.

Nobody knew how long the search would take. Could be weeks, could be months. If I didn’t do something about it now, it would just sit there. People would keep feeling stuck.

Generic Competencies Don’t Tell You Anything

I assumed the issue was just bad communication. Maybe our managers weren’t talking enough about growth. Maybe people didn’t know what senior looked like. Then I looked at what actually existed: career levels on paper. Generic enough to be meaningless. “Demonstrates strategic thinking.” “Drives collaboration.” The kind of competencies that describe literally everyone or nobody depending on how charitable you’re feeling.

In practice, nobody was using them. When it came time to talk about promotion, we defaulted to one metric: did you hit your OKRs? That’s not a career framework. That’s a scorecard that happens to be about career. If the only question you ask about growth is “what did you ship,” you’re implicitly saying output is all that counts.

Then the COO Said the Thing That Cracked It Open

When I proposed building role-specific career ladders, he pushed back. Reasonably. “Social Media is one person. Content is one person. Design is one person. Why spend the time building detailed growth frameworks for teams of one?”

It’s the kind of question that makes sense until you really think about it.

A career ladder is scaffolding for who a person can become, not for the team you have. For a team of one, that’s actually more true. When you’re solo, you don’t have peer feedback. You don’t have a cohort to calibrate against. You don’t have anyone else doing your role who can say “oh, that’s how we usually handle this.” A solo role is fundamentally more isolated, which means it’s more likely to stagnate if nobody gives the person a map of what growth actually looks like.

The ladder becomes the conversation. Instead of “you’re doing great,” you can say something that actually lands: “You’re consistently delivering at a Senior level on content strategy but still developing in stakeholder communication, which is a key expectation at the Lead level.” That’s feedback someone can act on.

It also flips something else. Without a ladder, high performers are stuck waiting for permission. They know they’re ready for more but can’t articulate it in language the organization recognizes. A ladder externalizes that. Suddenly they can self-assess, identify their gaps, and come to their manager with an actual plan.

OKRs tell you what someone accomplished in a quarter. A career ladder tells you how someone is evolving as a professional, whether they’re demonstrating the judgment, craft, and leadership behaviors that define the next level. Conflating those two is how you end up promoting your best executor into a role that requires skills they’ve never been asked to develop.

And the team-of-one model is becoming more common. As AI changes what’s possible, five-person design teams and three-person content operations are compressing. If you haven’t figured out how to structure growth for a one-person function, that’s going to be a real problem.

What Changed When We Actually Built Them

For Creative, building the ladder surfaced something we’d been feeling but couldn’t explain: a missing middle layer. Work that didn’t need senior judgment kept getting stuck because there was no intermediate role to do it. Suddenly we had the language to ask for what we needed. “We need more help” became “we need a production support role that handles X, Y, Z,” defensible and connected to actual work.

For Content, the change was smaller on the surface but felt bigger once you saw it. Before the ladder, every development conversation was a de facto OKR review. After we had a ladder, we could talk about judgment. How did you handle the decision to pivot messaging mid-quarter? What would you do differently on stakeholder communication? The team member started identifying their own growth edges and bringing them to one-on-ones. Growth stopped being a quarterly event. Both people in those roles left those conversations with more direction, which showed up in their energy.

Build Them With the People Doing the Work

Don’t write these alone. I built the ladders with the ICs. The collaboration made them better, people caught gaps I would have missed, and it gave people ownership over the growth criteria they’d be measured against.

A few things that held up:

  • Behaviors over skills. The best ladders describe what someone does: how they approach decisions, handle ambiguity, communicate, not just what they know.
  • Keep them alive. A published ladder that never gets updated is just as useless as the generic one it replaced.
  • Don’t wait for the right circumstances. I was temporary leadership with no guarantee I’d be around when these ladders were actually used for promotions. I built them anyway.

The Real Reason This Matters

The feedback that started all this was “I don’t have a path forward.” Not “I want a promotion” or “I need more money.” Just: I can’t see where I’m going.

Solo roles are the first to go quiet and then leave. They’re isolated by definition, and without a visible growth path, the best ones start looking elsewhere. A career ladder is cheap. Replacing a specialist who knows your brand, your voice, your systems is not.

And there’s a longer game. The person who spends two years developing judgment in a solo role, who learns when to push back, when to escalate, how to think about the work strategically, is the person who can lead a function when you scale. If you hire that second person and your first person isn’t ready to lead them, you’ve missed the window. You’ll hire the leader from outside and wonder why the team dynamic feels off.

Career ladders are how you develop that person on purpose instead of hoping it happens by accident.