October FAQ — Not Ready for Promotion
One Friday each month, I dedicate the post to looking at some questions I have heard recently from developing leaders. Sharing those questions and my thoughts about them is a way for me to spread the information to as many leaders and future leaders as possible. If you have a question about leadership, or just a situation you would like some additional insight on, please email me at Effective Retail Leader. Let’s take a look at this week’s question.
I have a manager who thinks he’s ready for a promotion, but I know he is not. How can I help him?
Helping people identify precisely where they are on their learning curve, and their readiness for next-level positions, can be a challenge for any leader. Most aspiring managers believe they are ready quickly, and usually before they really are. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to help them see that for themselves, especially if you have not been the one working with them over a long period of time.
One of the best ways to both assess and help counsel to the level of preparedness is to work through different scenario training. Spend some time setting up different real-life situations that you have faced in your career and walk them through those. Make sure you can find plenty of time that you will be uninterrupted to be able to set up the scenario and then have plenty of questions and decision points that will need to be discussed. It will be important to have the real outcomes ready to speak to, as well as some considerations that might occur based on the decisions they make. This is a lot like a real life choose your own adventure.
Another option for effective assessment and feedback is to have a counsel of multiple leaders that can provide situations and discussions to be reviewed from various perspectives. This can be helpful in that the input can come from different people and not just you. It can actually be a learning experience for everyone involved, so this type of set up is highly developmental. Everyone participating must provide detailed feedback and reasons for how they are assessing the situation. Once complete, you, as the direct supervisor, will have many more concrete ideas for the next steps in development.
The most important thing you can do is be entirely honest about why you feel they are not ready. Provide clear steps they need to take to demonstrate their fitness for the next role. Providing a clear development path is also necessary at this stage. You want to continue to encourage them and their development, and show them their way forward. Without this, you risk alienating them and potentially losing them to someone that would be willing to hire them away, even though they may not be ready.
Interestingly enough, I have found very few Assistant Managers that didn’t think they were absolutely ready to be a Store Manager before being promoted, yet once promoted acknowledge they were not as prepared as they believed they were. A question I frequently ask during the promotion process is, what they think they will learn once they get promoted. The most successful ones are the ones that acknowledge that they know they don’t know it all and have a plan for how they will handle that situation when it arises.
The last thing I will note on this topic: much of this can be avoided by having a well-defined succession planning process. I have just completed a full series of articles on the topic. With a program designed for developing talent, everyone knows where they stand along the way. The candidate is getting the development and feedback they need to be successful in future roles. The plan leads right into their new opportunities and ensure they are set up for success. The worst possible outcome in the scenario above is to promote someone who is not ready and have them fail. Your development program should build the trust that they will get their opportunity when they are ready. And, everyone will be on the same page as to what that looks like along the way. Succession planning is not just about getting promoted, it is an engagement, communication, and trust process as well.
Join other retail leaders in continuing their development journey with Effective Retail Leader.com. SUBSCRIBE today to receive FREE leadership tips directly to your inbox and monthly newsletters that provide many tools to help further develop your leadership skills all at no cost. JOIN NOW!
No spam ever - just leadership goodness.