Sometimes the VP gets surprised with budget or headcount constraints. Or maybe they were expecting the IC to perform a bit better this quarter, but other people

Sometimes the VP gets surprised with budget or headcount constraints. Or maybe they were expecting the IC to perform a bit better this quarter, but other people involved in the promo process do not feel that the IC has met the bar, and block the promo. And yeah, it's always possible that the VP is just saying what's necessary to keep the IC on the team and productive, but there's plenty of cases where the VP is trying for your promo, and we cannot tell from OPs comment exactly what's going on here.