You seriously don't understand that sometimes people are promoted for being good at their job, and sometimes people are fired for being bad at their job?
a) the company is growing by leaps and bounds and would rather promote internally X% of existing employees. --or- b) the company is facing a downturn and would like to get rid of X% of existing employees.
In neither case does it have much to do with the actual people falling into or out of that X% (unless a perfectly just system is in place [and it isn't]).
You're being asked to imagine yourself as the executive - you're the person with firing authority.
A manager who works for you asks you to fire someone on their team. There are a hundred people on various teams in your group, you don't have first-hand knowledge of all of their performance. You want to have a system in place for making sure this is a fair request, vs "we argued a few times the last week" or, in the really bad sorts of cases, something like "we had an affair and it ended badly and I'm trying to clean up the mess by firing them."
a higher-level manager somewhat arbitrarily comes out of the blue and wants to fire one of your team. You have no paperwork to back the idea that the request is misplaced/misguided.
"If you're a VP and suddenly someone asks, "Hey, can you promote or fire Person X?" What are you to go off of? Just a manager's recommendation? And you think perf reviews are biased?"
So 'someone' isn't defined, but from context, my assumption is that 'someone' is their direct manager (who works for you), since it's mentioned that 'manager's recommendation' is all that's known.
A situation where, say, the CTO is asking a VP to fire someone three or four levels below would be much stranger than a lower-level manager asking a VP to fire one of their reports, so between these two things I think it makes much more sense to resolve the ambiguity in that way.
This reading also has the benefit of suddenly making perfect sense and fitting the rest of the context of the original comment, which was about >100 employee organizations needing a paper trail.
-. could be a request from the VP's peer; i.e., another VP. Or from someone in a lateral org (such as HR).
-. the manager himself in your interpretation of events should have the power at least to fire (if not to promote).
The fact is: it was a very confusingly worded post and we've probably wasted more time on it than it warrants. :)
I once had a contract-to-hire job in which the contract supposedly stipulated that I was guaranteed a full-time permanent position if I passed the six-month performance review, otherwise I would be terminated. They told new hires this to convince them that it wasn't really a temp job. They kept me a temp for ten months, and then laid off all 120 of us.
I would love to believe that management is categorically reasonable, comprehensible, and truthful, but that’s not my experience.
At some companies, these people are well selected, trained, and caring individuals who understand who to build and nurture teams.
At others, these people are dicks who have got into their position via Peter Principle. being frat buddies with CEO etc. who view workers as resources to be squeezed and discarded.
And everywhere in between.
Sounds like you got unlucky at that place.
The manager wants to promote the employee, but she needs permission from the VP. So the manager asks the VP to promote the employee.