More than ever companies are concerned with how to keep their top talent. Among the reasons employees leave are lack of career progress, poor work/life balance, not feeling valued by the company, and bad bosses.
One retention strategy is to promote from within. This is a great idea as it addresses a number of retention goals in one shot. Promoting from within shows loyalty to your employees. It demonstrates the value an employee has to your organization. It also provides a path for career progress and creates great bosses.
Or does it? Are you actually setting your employees up for failure?
Anyone who has done any research on retention is familiar with the adage “Employees don’t leave bad jobs, they leave bad bosses.” So if your company promotes from within, how could you have bad bosses? After all, you are careful in your promotion process. You evaluate and assess and only advance your highest performers.
But what do you do after that? How do you develop and train your managers once they get that promotion? What are you doing that could be preventing your promoted managers from being successful?
Just because an employee was a high performer in his/her area doesn’t automatically mean he/she will make a great manager. The abilities required to be an effective leader often differ greatly from those needed in the role the employee just left. Yes, knowing the previous role inside and out and having excelled there is important, but often, soft skills that haven’t been required before are integral to doing a good job as a manager. Some of these new necessary skills include:
Objectivity – the new manager is now in a role where being objective is mandatory.
Diplomacy – managers often have to deliver difficult messages.
Delegation – high performers tend to take on a lot of responsibility. This is usually why they are high performers. Delegating means relinquishing control and this can prove to be a difficult adjustment.
Managing Conflict – conflicts will arise and the manager is now responsible for resolving them. This is probably not something the manager did on a regular basis. He/she may have even been part of the conflict in the past as opposed to being the one who fixes it.
Business Acumen – managers have to understand the company’s long term goals and realize how the short term objectives fit into these goals. Then they have to get their team to understand this.
Understanding of Corporate Culture – As an employee, the manager probably didn’t spend a lot of time analyzing the culture but rather adapted to it. As a manager, the responsibility shifts to understanding it in order to get the team to buy into it and perform accordingly.
Communication – Not only does the manager need to understand the corporate culture and goals but he/she needs to effectively relay them to the team in order to achieve not only the objectives, but alignment with corporate philosophy.
Consider that previously the manager was responsible for his/her part in a project and although most of these skills were undoubtedly required on occasion, the actual work produced was the most important focus. Even if there were stumbles with these soft skills, the work produced trumped these issues. Now consider the change for the manager when the work he/she needs to produce IS these soft skills.
If your organization doesn’t pay attention to the magnitude of this promotion, everyone loses. The company no longer has the high performer in the previous role, the new manager may feel lost and unsure, the team could feel as if they have no leader, and ultimately, everyone is disengaged and starts seeking greener pastures. Your “Promote from Within” retention strategy just became an anti-retention strategy.
What does your company do after promoting high performers? Is enough emphasis placed on the difference in skills required to do the job well? What could the organization do differently?
















