When You Can't Offer Your Top Performer a Promotion, What to Offer Them Instead

5 ways to enable meaningful growth for your team when traditional advancement isn't on the table

👋 Howdy! Claire here, Founder & CEO of Canopy. I've spent the last decade studying 50+ years worth of leadership research and training 50,000+ leaders. Each week, I distill all my learnings in this weekly newsletter.

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“What in the world am I supposed to offer them?”

A senior leader said this to me recently — bewildered and stumped about what to do.

They had a high performer on their team, someone who delivered consistently exceptional results, and their quarterly check-in with this person was around the corner. In most settings, this would be the obvious moment where the leader would praise their top performer and offer them some kind of promotion.

But their organization isn't scaling right now. It's stable (which in today's market conditions is its own victory), but it means there's no new rung for the direct report to climb, no title change on the horizon, no significant raise in the budget.

The leader confessed to me: “I know I can't offer something I can't give. But I'm also super worried that if I don't offer something, I'm going to lose this person.”

It's a sentiment I've heard across many companies I've been working with. With economic uncertainty, flattening hierarchies due to AI, and tightened budgets, the traditional “work hard, move up” promise feels increasingly hollow. Yet we still need our teams to be engaged, not just passing time until the market improves.

So what do we do when the standard playbook of promotions and raises is temporarily closed?

An instinct that backfires

If you're in this situation, typically the first natural reaction is to avoid the topic entirely. You kick the can down the road and skip the “growth conversation” part in your quarterly one-on-one meeting.

You convince yourself that you're being humane: Why remind people of what you can't give them? Why set expectations you can't meet?

But avoidance creates a vacuum that people fill with their own narratives: “They don't value me,” “There's no future here,” and “I'm stuck.”

So then, you might try a different tactic: Vague reassurances about “when things pick up” and “future opportunities.”

Unfortunately, this is worse. When you offer hazy notions that might never materialize, you create false hope rather than genuine clarity.

You need something different. What I've observed through my work with thousands of leaders is that when traditional advancement is off the table, we need to change the conversation entirely. Not with platitudes about “growth mindset” or generic development plans, but with something more fundamental and surprisingly more powerful.

Beyond the promotion proxy

Most career conversations center around promotions because they're convenient shorthand. Tangible, visible, easy to explain. But they're also mere proxies for what people truly seek.

Think about your own career for a moment. When you've wanted a promotion, what were you really after? Status? Certainly. Money? Often. But dig deeper and you'll usually find something more fundamental: You sought a sense of mastery, autonomy, purpose, recognition, challenge, and perhaps even security.

The promotion is simply one pathway to these deeper needs — and when that pathway is blocked, we need to find others.

The secret isn't finding alternatives to promotions: It's uncovering what promotions were alternatives for in the first place.

A different framework when promotions aren't available

After working with leaders who've faced this exact challenge over the past decade-plus, I've developed a different approach to career development that holds true even when promotions aren't on the table:

1. Uncover the real drivers (not just the career aspirations)

Skip the standard “Where do you see yourself in five years?” Instead, try questions that get to underlying motivations of your direct reports:

• “What parts of your work make you lose track of time?”

• “When have you felt most energized and fulfilled in your role?”

• “If money and titles were off the table, what would make your work most satisfying?”

In one company I worked with, when a leader asked these questions to their high performer, it revealed something crucial: What she really craved wasn't the next title but deeper expertise and external recognition. The promotion was purely her assumed path to those things.

This shift in understanding changes everything. When we see that a team member craves expertise and recognition rather than simply the next role level, completely different options emerge: The leader in this situation offered their direct report ownership of a tough, new project and presenting it to the rest of the company — and it was something that the top performer later remarked was “a highlight of my career.”

2. Create growth within roles, not just between them

Most career development focuses on preparing people for the next role. But the richest growth often happens by expanding and evolving current roles.

For each team member, try to identify:

• Which aspects of their role can be deepened

• Which new dimensions could be added

• Which parts could be shed to make room for growth

For example, if your top performer is seeking expertise and recognition, you might map out how they could:

• Take ownership of the most technically complex projects

• Develop thought leadership content that would build their industry profile

• Mentor more junior team members, solidifying their own knowledge

None of these require a promotion or budget approval, yet all push your team member toward genuine growth.

3. Connect individual work to larger impact

When traditional advancement is limited, people often lose sight of how their work contributes to something meaningful. They feel stuck in place, spinning their wheels.

Counter this by constantly connecting day-to-day tasks to broader impact:

• How does their work affect end customers?

• How does it influence company results?

• How does it create value beyond the immediate deliverables?

One leader I work with took this even further by instituting monthly “impact conversations” where they explicitly discuss these connections. For people craving purpose, this creates meaning even when titles aren't changing.

4. Engineer recognition beyond advancement

Promotions often signal public acknowledgment of value. As a result, without them, we need to be intentional about creating other forms of recognition.

This goes beyond casual “Good job” comments dropped in Slack. It means:

• Creating formal opportunities to showcase work to leadership

• Facilitating cross-team visibility so peers can see the work they're doing

• Finding external validation through client interactions or industry participation

For example, for your team member, you could arrange for them to present their approach at a client workshop and/or lead your department's knowledge-sharing series — both providing the expert recognition they crave.

5. Build skills with tangible milestones

Without promotion timelines, development can feel nebulous and never-ending. Counter this by creating concrete skill development plans with clear checkpoints.

For instance, you can work with each team member to identify:

• 2-3 specific skills to develop over the next six months

• How you'll know they've made progress (concrete deliverables)

• How these skills serve both current performance and long-term growth

These become your focus in one-on-ones, giving a sense of forward movement even when organizational advancement isn't available.

The questions that actually matter

The framework above transforms career conversations from your employees asking, “When can I move up?” to questions that drive engagement regardless of advancement opportunities:

• “How can I achieve mastery in areas that energize me?”

• “Where can I have meaningful impact that I care about?”

• “How can I gain more autonomy over my work?”

• “Where can I get recognition for my contributions?”

Focus on answering these questions together with your team member. With one leader I worked with, these questions led to a development plan with a key performer that had nothing to do with their next title and everything to do with what actually drove their engagement. Six months later, despite no promotion in sight, the employee told the leader that he felt more invested in his role than ever before.

The unexpected advantage of constraint

There's an uncomfortable truth I've come to appreciate: Sometimes, the absence of traditional advancement creates space for more meaningful growth.

When promotions are readily available, they become the default metric of success. Development becomes transactional: Check these boxes, wait your turn, move up.

When that expected path is unavailable, we're forced to look deeper. To understand individual drivers for what motivates people, rather than assuming it's the new title. To consider each person's development as personal to them, rather than copy-and-paste. To view growth as something within the role itself, not just between roles.

This isn't meant to sugarcoat tough realities. Limited advancement opportunities create real challenges for sustained motivation when the worker market is as competitive as it is. But they also push us toward a more nuanced understanding and deeper respect for what our team members may actually care about.

Start the conversation you're not having

If you're avoiding career conversations because you don't have promotions or raises to offer, you may be missing an opportunity to address what your team members truly need.

You may want to try this: In your next one-on-one, acknowledge the elephant in the room…

“I know we're not in a position to offer promotions right now. But that doesn't mean your growth isn't important. I'd like to understand what aspects of your work matter most to you, and how we can create meaningful development even within these constraints.”

This honesty creates space for a different kind of conversation — one that might reveal opportunities for engagement and growth you hadn't considered.

Because while we can't always offer our teams the next step on the ladder, we can help them find meaning, mastery, and forward movement right where they are. And sometimes, that's what they were really after all along.

In the end, your most valuable currency as a leader isn't titles or compensation packages — it's your ability to see what truly drives each person on your team and create pathways to those deeper needs, regardless of organizational constraints.

-Claire

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If you’re looking for more ways to coach your top performers, here are ways you can directly work directly with me, Claire, Founder & CEO of Canopy:

• 🌳 Partner together to create custom trainings for your senior and frontline leaders to help them coach their top performers and enable team growth, even if promotions aren’t on the table.

• 📣 Invite me to deliver team keynotes and workshops at your next offsite, remotely or in person, on topics such as “Growth Conversations” and “Coaching Top Performers.”

• 🌿 Use Canopy, our lightweight leadership learning app, in your day-to-day.

• 🤝 Explore 1:1 executive coaching with me personally to help you with coaching your top performers. (I periodically have spots upon up throughout the year — I’ve had the privilege of coaching leaders at companies like Apple and Uber, and welcome the opportunity to share those learnings in-depth with folks one-on-one.)

I’d be honored to chat and see what might be the best fit for you. Feel free to reach out to me directly here 💚

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