Skip to main content
Your Employee Matters

HAVE YOU EVER PROMOTED THE WRONG PERSON INTO MANAGEMENT?

By December 1, 2012No Comments

When we asked Webinar participants this question, 76% replied yes. Please take advantage of the Webinar First Time Supervisors and Managers and the White Paper:Critical Transition: From Employee to Manager, program. Here are some pointers that these tools set forth:

  1. Promotion into management is a hiring decision.
  2. Make sure they want the promotion more than you do.
  3. Talk about expectations upfront and what “outs” the company and employee have if these expectations are unmet. The last thing you want to do is let go of a poor manager and lose a great employee in the process.
  4. Make sure that these managers have a formalized training process (see the previous article)

Here’s another chart from that Webinar. The first hurdle for a new manager is “moving from friend to boss”. The second is “learning how not to do the job of others”.

Think about it this way: If you’re paying an employee $30,000 a year ($15 an hour) and you then promote them to management and pay them $50,000 a year ($25 an hour), every time they do $15 an hour work, you lose. Although nobody is suggesting that friendships end because of a promotion, becoming a boss is a fundamental shift that might require assistance. You can role-play scenarios with these managers. What type of situations show up in your workplace when you ask managers to do the jobs of others, or when people try to influence management decisions with their friendships? Teach your managers how to deal with these situations effectively and you’ll have far better managers.