If you wait to promote people who are “already doing the job”, I think you’ll find that you don’t retain your best people. And if you are hiring people into senior positions instead of promoting, you don’t deserve to.

Even if you do, it’s a kind of wage-theft to not pay people for the work they are doing. A few months is ok, a year is absolutely not if you have the positions. If you’ve already done this, consider a bonus at promotion time.

If you have the positions, but people don’t seem ready, that’s on you. You should have supported and developed them before they were needed. If the opportunity is there, you should take the chance and responsibility for their success.

Meaning, if it doesn’t work out, you were the failure. You failed to develop them in time, and you failed to support them so that they were successful.