Employee Promotions: Worthy and Ready?

With fourth quarter underway and economic challenges ahead like nothing most of us have seen before, decisions about which employees should be promoted will face businesses this year in a new light. Those who will be selected to rise through management ranks and become future leaders are perhaps more important choices at this juncture than in years past. But defining the right criteria for promotion isn’t as easy as it seems. What often happens is that companies focus on technical skills and other tangible performance factors at the exclusion of other important variables that are less concrete. For example, it is as common for companies to promote individuals who exceed sales goals as it is uncommon for employees to be promoted based on their ability to form and develop healthy relationships.

So how can businesses set the right markers to ensure that their promotion decisions pay off?

Well, by all measure, employees need to have proven themselves as valuable contributors and properly skilled workers in order to be viable candidates for promotion. It’s a good start. But in addition, they also need to be individuals who can handle the power that comes with management responsibility, which means they need to appreciate that they have the power to affect people’s lives in the first place. Unfortunately though, in practice that “affect” is often not for the better, but for the worse. In turn, organizations then suffer the adverse effects of having the wrong people in leadership roles because they are more interested in the power trip than in managing people for the greater good of the organization and its future growth.

Traditionally employees have been rewarded with promotion and compensation for a job well done, but only in retrospect. Rarely do companies ask themselves how well a person is psychologically prepared to handle power in advance. So along with exceeding goals and meeting objectives, organizations would be well served to evaluate whether promotion-worthy candidates are actually promotion-ready.

So in the end, who does make the best manager? Which individuals do get the most out of their teams and produce the best business results for their employers?

For starters, you need to identify people who don’t need power to feel important. Real leaders don’t care who is “above” them enough to let it alter their standard of behavior. They care more about output than fiefdoms and treat everyone with the same amount of respect and responsiveness regardless of “level.” Driving results, creating synergies and building teams are paramount to them. In short, true leaders are able to focus on others rather than on themselves.

It seems obvious that organizations should want people who give of themselves rather than take for themselves. But in reality, many of the people who have been promoted into management positions are mostly interested in their own advancement irrespective of its relationship to those around them. The greatest opportunity here is to look through a different lens so that we begin to include individuals in the promotional pool who have the maturity to turn their responsibility for other people and their performances into something bigger and better than themselves.

So when it comes time to determine who deserves a promotion and who doesn’t, look back not only at the past, but also forward into the future. Question whether an individual is apt to misuse the power as a means to lift him or herself up, or if he/she will instead use it to lift up the individuals on his or her team.

Some Tactical Pointers:

Identify those who have performed well in quantifiable terms.
Collect feedback from people who interact with those being considered for promotion who surround the candidate on all levels.
Interview the candidate to assess his/her perspective on assuming a role that manages others and what they hope to get out of it.
Bottom line: The greatest power is having the ability to bring out the best in people and being able to motivate them to achieve their highest levels of performance.

Employee Promotions: Worthy and Ready? - To learn more about this author, visit Donna Flagg's Website.

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