Are you promoting the right people?
Have you ever considered leaving a job to escape working with an ineffective manager? Or are you an employer who often hears that managers on your team are ineffective during exit interviews? If your answer to either of the questions is yes, you’re not alone.
A 2021 Gallup study pointed out that 82% of the time companies promote the wrong employees to leadership positions. The study also revealed that most companies promote employees based on their past performance on a role. While it may seem counterintuitive, it’s important to understand that employees who can perform — and even excel — in their current roles may not necessarily be the best fit for promotions or leadership positions. Unfortunately, in most organizations, the number of years an employee has worked with the firm, a high appraisal score, or sometimes even his or her popularity may be enough to promote an employee. This traditional ‘rite of passage’ is often the only way an employee can progress at some organisations.
Conventional methods of succession planning reinforce homogeneity in leadership roles and drive the organization towards stagnation. Decision makers and leaders are biased towards those employees who have followed a similar path as themselves. Since these methods encourage tenure based promotion, a leader who was promoted after 10 years of hard work is likely to promote someone who also has a similar organisational tenure than them, even if their tenure was completely unrelated to their success in the leadership role. Companies fail to realize that emotional intelligence, communication skills, and employees’ fitment to motivate and guide a team are better predictors of success in a leadership role.
This approach to succession planning is flawed and damaging to the productivity of the team, since managers play a significant role in influencing an employee’s work, in addressing conflicts at work, and in deciding their promotions and bonuses. Incompetent managers and leaders ultimately impact employees in many ways:
Lower Engagement
There is plenty of evidence which cements that leader-member interactions are strongly associated with engagement and job satisfaction. A 2014 Gallup study found that managers account for over two-thirds of employee engagement scores. Employees spend a considerable amount of their time interacting with managers, and the relationship with their manager is often the best or the worst part of their job. Managers who lack communication skills fail to set consistent expectations from their employees. This leads to unpredictability and confusion around work priorities which consequently results in disengagement.
Job Stress and Burnout
84% of employees in an SHRM survey agree to the claim that poorly trained and incompetent managers cause unnecessary work and stress. A manager’s inability to effectively delegate responsibilities, poor communication, and desire for control often make them micromanage employees. Micromanagement due to a lack of leadership skills and training is a waste of time and talent for everyone in the organization. Not only the employees will be burdened with unnecessary stress but the manager will also spend considerable time micromanaging instead of developing the team’s strengths.
High Turnover
When your employees are disengaged, experience high stress, and have poor relationships with their managers, it is no surprise that they will consider leaving the organization. For many years, leadership journals have quoted “People don’t leave bad jobs, they leave bad bosses”, and have corroborated that poor management is the number one reason for employees switching jobs.
Evidently, the skills and talent required to succeed in non-managerial roles vastly differ from the skills required to succeed in managerial positions. So it’s about time that we move away from making promotion decisions the traditional way and instead start assessing the skills that determine whether a candidate is fit for promotion to a leadership role. There are two primary ways to ensure you identify and promote the right people for future roles:
1. Take a data-driven approach through skills assessments
Re-think your approach to succession planning and make decisions objectively based on employees’ proficiency in role-specific skills. Within your organization, find out the skills that help leaders succeed and assess your employees’ leadership potential on those skills.
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Relying on scientific evidence and data is a transparent and effective approach to promoting employees, says Kristan Barry, director of hiring analytics at Gallup. This approach reduces the over-reliance on tenure and performance on past roles as a determinant of future success. Moreover, it helps to recognize the hidden potential of employees who may have been overshadowed by those with social influence and visibility.
Skillr is a talent intelligence platform and has optimized decades’ worth of I/O psychology research to develop data-driven skills assessments. It helps employers make informed succession decisions by benchmarking their employees on job-specific skill sets. Assessing the skill proficiency of your employees also helps in the identification of strengths and gaps which can further devise your hiring and learning & development strategy.
2. Leadership Development Programs
Once you have identified employees with leadership potential and have assessed their skill gaps, designing and implementing leadership training interventions can be beneficial. Although some may believe that leaders are born, there are many skills that can be cultivated to improve one’s potential for leadership, such as coaching and communication. Implementing leadership development programs makes the organization future-ready by nurturing leaders who are competent and can effectively manage the workforce and drive results.
If you are still considering whether to invest in skills assessment or leadership development programs, consider the cost of promoting the wrong people. On average companies in the US incur a loss of $16,500/year for each employee who doesn’t perform well in their role. Clearly, it is far more expensive to deal with the fallouts of incompetent managers who affect employee engagement, productivity, and turnover. It’s about time we move towards an objective and data-driven approach to talent management that ensures your organisation has an engaged and productive workforce.
