Well Managed

Reward the Right Disasters

Years ago, when I was working for another company, we sent one of our team leaders to one of the big annual conferences for our industry. We would do this periodically to give our team leaders a broader perspective on the business and maybe pick up a few new ideas.

This particular team leader, let’s call her Rosie, came back from the conference very enthusiastic about a program she had heard about there. A company had presented a seminar that was basically a sales pitch for their program and she thought it could increase our quality while decreasing our costs.

We agreed it seemed promising and put her in charge of implementing the program at our company. (I’ll have to talk more about this particular technique for rewarding initiative and testing leadership potential in a future post.)

Long story short, it was a huge disaster. Customers hated it. Didn’t save us any money. Generated massive negative publicity. Some people were so angry they complained about it to the Governor. I'm not kidding.

So we promoted Rosie to a higher-level management job. In fact, we created a brand new managerial position for her with responsibility for a number of critical company functions.

Were we crazy? Why would we promote someone whose first pet project turned out to be such a flop?

Lots of good reasons, actually:

• Initiative. We had sent lots of team leaders to conferences. Rosie was the first one to come back with a project proposal.
• Effectiveness. Rosie was very effective at guiding the implementation of a complex program, which included coordinating the work of multiple external and internal players.
• Responsibility. The fact that the program went bad was not really Rosie’s fault. We all thought the vendor seemed good and the program looked promising. Only with 20/20 hindsight we could see the flaws that led to the disaster. But Rosie accepted full responsibility for the consequences and never tried to point the finger at anyone else.
• Composure. However bad it got, Rosie never lost her temper or got down in the dumps. She dealt with the situation professionally, recognized early that the situation was not salvageable, conducted effective damage control, and wrapped up the program promptly.

Hmm. Someone who takes initiative, implements new programs effectively, accepts responsibility, and keeps her composure in difficult times.

Sounds like a good manager to me.

And she was. Rosie thrived in her new job. She had been an okay front line employee and a pretty decent team leader. But with this promotion she hit her true level. She was a terrific manager.

So here’s the tip: look past the consequences at the actions. A good result doesn’t always mean the leader was good and bad result doesn’t always mean the leader was bad. Promote people whose demonstrated habits of thought, emotion, and behavior mark them as potential leaders.

Never Give Anyone a Promotion (part 3)

Here are part one and part two of this series.

In the first two parts of this series we saw that rather than give a promotion we should offer a promotion. This post is about the nuts and bolts of offering a promotion.

I’ve provided a basic outline for conducting a promotion offer meeting on the Free Resources for Managers page. You can print the outline and use it as a reference when doing your own promotions. (You’re welcome!) You might want to open it or print it now, because in this post I'll be commenting on a few aspects of the outline.

Reading the outline might make it sound like the promotion offer meeting is kind of dull. But that’s just because outlines naturally tend to have a bureaucratic tone. In reality, the meeting should be lively, engaging, and energetic.

Remember, your goal for this meeting is to do everything you can to help the promotee succeed in her new position. At the end of the meeting, she should feel energized and enthusiastic but she should also be taking the situation seriously. She should be happy to have the opportunity but also prepared for the challenges ahead of her.

Here are some comments on a few key aspects of the meeting:

Greeting. Deliver the good news as soon as possible to put the employee out of her suspense. Some managers seem to take a perverse delight in drawing out the suspense while the employee squirms, not knowing whether the news will be good or bad, but that’s no way to build a relationship of trust with a member of your leadership team. When she comes in, you give her a big smile and before she even sits down you stand up and say, "I have good news: we're offering the promotion to you!" and shake her hand. Once the congratulations are done, you can all sit down together to discuss the particulars.

Appreciation. This is a great opportunity to reinforce good behaviors and make a good employee feel recognized and appreciated. Some people find giving and getting compliments to be awkward but this meeting creates a natural excuse for being open with your praise.

Improvement. If the employee doesn’t have any performance or behavior problems you can skip this step. But think hard about it. This is a great opportunity to address the kinds of things that might not come up in a performance review.

For example, a few years ago I had an excellent employee who, in brainstorming meetings, would sometimes make a frowny face and lapse into a sort of tired and downbeat tone of voice. It looked and sounded like he was giving up on solving the problem but I suspected that he was actually just thinking deeply, and that the expression and voice were just a behavioral habit. When I offered him a promotion to supervisor I described this behavior to him and he was shocked to hear it. We agreed he could not act that way as a leader and he kicked the habit very quickly.

Risk. This part varies widely. I recall one candidate who had potential but also had a lot of learning and growing to do and who didn't seem to be taking the promotion very seriously. I ended up pointing out to her that we would fill her old job, that it was the only position of its kind in the company, that there were no other positions suitable for her in the company, and that therefore if she did not succeed in her new job she would be unemployed. It was tough medicine but it sobered her up in a hurry. She took the challenge seriously and came through with flying colors.

However, there was another employee who needed the opposite approach. We were absolutely sure he would make a great supervisor but he didn't want to leave the comfort zone of his frontline position and wanted to turn down the promotion. We ended up pointing out to him that there were plenty of positions for his frontline work and promised that if he didn’t like being a supervisor after a few months he could have his old job back. He took the promotion, loved his new work, and to this day is a very successful supervisor. He and I still laugh together about the experience.

Conclusion. Make the employee sleep on the decision. This reinforces the idea that it's an important decision that must be taken seriously. If the employee says, "I don’t need to sleep on it, I accept." Just say something like, "It’s great that you’re feeling so enthusiastic about it and I’ll bet you’ll feel the same way tomorrow morning. Let’s talk then."

I'll have more to say about the nuances of the promotion offer meeting in future posts, but that should be enough to get you started. Happy promoting!

Never Give Anyone a Promotion (part 2)

Here is part one of this series.

So picture this: a supervisory position opens up in your organization and you post it internally. A bunch of your good employees apply for the promotion, you interview them all, and you pick the right candidate. You know you’re going to have to break the bad news to the unsuccessful candidates, but first you get to do the fun part: delivering the good news to the lucky person who’s getting the promotion.

This part’s a no-brainer, right? You just call her into your office, give her a big smile, offer a hearty handshake, and say, "congratulations, we’re giving you the promotion!" Then you give her a raise and a new title, go over a few details, and bingo, you’re done.

Wrong! Rewind the video my friend, because if that’s how you’ve been doing promotions you’ve been fumbling one of your greatest management opportunities.

In the previous post we looked at the goodies that come with promotions. Those are the things that make people want to be promoted. Now let’s look at the other things that come with a promotion, the things that determine whether the newly-promoted individual will succeed in her new position:

• Shifting Responsibilities. Succeeding in a higher-level position requires the candidate to clearly understand and accept the new responsibilities that come with the position. Just as important, she must commit to letting go of and delegating the responsibilities of the previous position.
• New Skills. You need to spell out the new skills the candidate will need to acquire in order to succeed in the new position. The candidate must acknowledge that she will need those skills and currently lacks them, and make a commitment to acquire them.
• Need for Growth. This is the time to candidly address any current deficiencies in performance or behavior that the candidate must remedy. Again, the candidate must acknowledge them and make a commitment to remedying them.
• Recognition of Strengths. Just as important as the need for new skills and for remedying deficiencies, you must review with the candidate all of her great strengths and fine characteristics, all of the wonderful things about her that earned her the promotion. Personally, I really enjoy this part of the promotion meeting, but many managers have a hard time doing this with sufficient detail and emotional sincerity to truly make it sink in for the candidate. However, it is vital that the candidate acknowledge her strengths and commit to continuing and developing all those wonderful things after the promotion. One of the most common reasons that previously successful employees fail after a promotion is that they change in negative ways, abandoning some of the behaviors that could have helped them succeed.
• Risk. No matter how successful the employee was in her previous position and no matter how confident you are that she'll do well in the new position, there is a genuine risk of failure. If you're running a selective organization, you must tell the candidate that in your position you absolutely cannot pretend that anyone is succeeding who is not -- even a person you like very much -- and what will happen if she doesn't succeed. Don’t let an employee just slide unthinkingly into the new position with all her attention focused on the raise and the cool new title. An honest assessment of risk is sobering and conveys to the candidate that deciding whether to accept the promotion is not a decision to be made lightly.
• Join the Leadership Team. Every one of your employees who has supervisory responsibility is part of your leadership team. (Hopefully, you’re actually treating all those folks as a true leadership team!) A frontline employee moving into management must be welcomed to the team and agree to genuinely join the team. This may require a shift in self-identity that is subtle but important.

Notice that each item on this list requires some kind of commitment from the employee. When promoting, your goal is to do everything you can to ensure the future success of the promotee, which in turn will contribute to your success and to the success of your organization. In order to maximize the likelihood of success you must gain the employee’s commitment to each of the above items. You do that by putting these items together with the goodies from yesterday’s post and offering them as a package deal. To say "yes" to the goodies, she also needs to say "yes" to all these commitments.

In the next post on this subject, we'll review the nuts and bolts of how you can successfully conduct the promotion offer process.

Here is part three of this series.

Never Give Anyone a Promotion (part 1)

Okay, I admit that once again I’m having a little fun here, coming up with a deliberately provocative way to present an idea. But this truly is an important concept for managers: you should never give anyone a promotion. Hopefully this dramatic way of phrasing the idea will make it memorable for you.

Hint: the key word here is "give."

Let’s take a step back and think about what a promotion means. There are two desirable things that come with a promotion. The first is money. A promotion usually includes a raise. In fact, in some companies a promotion is the only way to get a substantial raise. More money always has high value and is a concrete, quantifiable reward.

The second desirable thing that comes with a promotion is a set of rewards that are somewhat less tangible than money but are nevertheless very valuable. They include power, status, pride, recognition, opportunity, and a sense of progress and achievement. Let’s review these a little further:

• Power. An employee promoted into a supervisory position is being granted the authority to tell other human beings what to do and how to do it, and also to judge the value of their work and the appropriateness of their behavior. That's no small thing!
• Status. In our culture, for better or for worse, our self-identity is tied strongly to our work. A more prestigious title confers elevated status.
• Pride. There are few things in life more fulfilling than the sense of pride that comes from working hard to achieve a goal and then achieving it.
• Recognition. When you promote an employee you're giving that employee recognition for all the achievements and skills that earned the promotion. Receiving recognition is very rewarding.
• Opportunity. For an individual who wants to achieve great things, a promotion provides an increased opportunity to create, build, nurture, encourage, challenge, learn, and discover.
• A sense of progress and achievement. Most people want to feel that their lives aren't stuck but rather are growing and improving. Earning a promotion is one great way to feel that you're getting somewhere.

When you think about it, a promotion is really a big deal!

So then the question for you as a manager is: are you going to give all that money and emotional fulfillment away for nothing? Are you really just going to hand over all that financial and emotional booty as a gift and gain no managerial advantage from it?

I hope not, because that would be a terrible waste of a rare opportunity to exert a positive influence on an employee’s future success. The only other opportunity this good is when you're hiring a new employee.

Recall that there are three critical issues in hiring, firing, and promoting: who, when, and how. We're talking here about the “how” of promoting. Even if you promote the right person at the right time, if you just give the promotion to the employee you'll be missing a wonderful opportunity to help that employee succeed in her new position. It’s in your interest as a manager (and also as a human being who cares about your employees) to use all the leverage at your disposal to give the newest member of your leadership team the maximum opportunity to succeed.

That’s why you never give a promotion, you always offer a promotion. And what you offer is a package deal. The goodies we discussed above are part of that package. In my next post we’ll talk about the rest of the package and then we’ll go into the nuts and bolts of how to make the offer.

PS: Trust me, the difference between giving and offering is not a semantic trifle. It’s huge. Stick around and see for yourself!

Here are part two and part three of this series.

A Wonderful Problem

We recently had an opening in a supervisor position, because the very successful incumbent was ready to move on to a new job within the company. This particular supervisory spot is a key position because this supervisor runs a training and development unit, and the graduates of that unit go on to perform critically important work. I decided to help select the new supervisor personally.

Seven employees submitted applications seeking to be promoted into the position. My assistant put the applications on my desk and I leafed through them to see who had applied. When I got to the bottom of the stack, I leaned back in my chair feeling, frankly, a little stunned. Every applicant was a superb employee. I looked back through the applications. Sure enough, there was not a single applicant who could be eliminated from consideration.

In fact, as I thought about it further I realized we could literally try to identify the least-qualified candidate of the bunch, give that person the job, and we would still have chosen an excellent supervisor. We apply very high standards in who we promote into supervisory positions, so this was a remarkable realization.

Every once in awhile, we managers get to enjoy the sweet sensation of having an important thing well. This was one of those moments for me. My directors, managers, and supervisors have, for the past five years, exercised a consistently high level of discipline in hiring and firing. It was not always easy and it was not always fun, but we have rigorously pursued the vision of building a truly selective organization and now we could enjoy the fruits of that labor. We have assembled an excellent staff well-stocked with talent and potential, as well as terrific personalities.

Of course, selecting a single individual to promote from that exceptional field of candidates was going to be very, very difficult. But what a wonderful problem to have!