FREE online courses on Building a Winning Team - Support - Prepare for
Promotion
A survey by
Charles Margerison of 1000
Chief Executives revealed that Five major reasons for their success
were:
- ability to work with a wide variety of people
- early responsibility for important tasks
- a need to achieve results
- leadership experience early in career
- wide experience in many functions prior to age 35
What is
significant is that, while a and c are ‘innate qualities'
the other three are entirely within your power to grant. Keep these
findings in mind for developing staff. Now a word on promotion policies:
Instead of assessing the
candidate's suitability for the job he's being considered for promotion
to, we promote him for performing well on his present assignment! So he
may end up as another example of the Peter Principle in action…a
pity and a great waste.
To prepare
for promotion, your staff needs to be (a) trained to acquire skills associated with the
particular post, and (b)
developed by delegation, where results can be quantified and accountability
fixed. Often, there is a risk is
involved, to be shared by both of you, just as you would both share the ultimate
fruits of successful outcome of such delegation. Note that the amount of learning is in
direct proportion to the size of the error.
As covered in Module 8, delegate by ‘active absenteeism', leaving the
subordinate to swim in the ‘deep end' alone…after a preliminary exposure under
your watchful control, of course.(a) You get feedback from various quarters about his performance (b) You are seen as ‘not indispensable'---
hence available for promotion (indispensable people don't get promoted). [One young executive, seeing a potential future officer in his
boss's secretary, started giving her increasingly larger portions of his routine
work till one day she expressed resentment at doing his work. He
explained that she was welcome to go on as before, but if she could do his job, she could have it; the boss
could train/ develop him to take over his office and move up himself.
She got the message; twenty years later, she is the
Company Secretary of a multi-national company---with a fleet of secretaries of
her own!]
Staff at all levels
can be developed in this manner; the earlier they are so exposed, the better.
Their motivation and abilities are strengthened, as is the company's pool of
trained manpower, ready, willing and able to compete, in healthy rivalry, for
available slots. You have to think about developing senior executives for the
organization's future needs … NOW!
QUESTIONS:
1.On what factors, in your
valuable opinion, should ‘promotion' be based? Why is promotion necessary? Is it
redundant?
- Explain the promotion policy in your organization (if there is
one!), giving your reasoning on how it can be improved.
