On the face of it, a promotion should be a joyous event. Someone in your organisation has performed well, shown great promise, and been rewarded with elevation. Splendid. So why do so many promotions turn into train wrecks?
The fault almost always lies with the executives who made the promotion. Here’s a list of six common reasons why promotions fail to work and end up damaging the organisation.
Promoting someone and assuming they can cope
Almost every promotion carries a risk of failure, because you’re catapulting a person into a new role that they’ve either never done before, or haven’t performed in this particular part of the organisation. Blithely assuming the candidate has all the skills they need to do well means you’re closing your eyes to this risk; you’re taking it for granted that they will handle the new challenges of the role, get on well with a new team of reports, and thrive under their new line manager. Really? Fortune-tellers belong in a circus, not a business. Everybody involved in a promotion needs to accept that there are transition risks; these have to be identified and managed to ensure the promotion works well, and doesn’t derail an entire team (and the hapless candidate’s career).
Making someone a manager because they’re good at their current role (yes, the one they’re leaving)
This classic misjudgement assumes a highly accomplished doer will make a great manager of their former doer colleagues. Unless you’re very lucky, you have just inflicted a double blow on your organisation: first, you’ve weakened a team by taking away one of their most effective members; second, you’ve put somebody in charge who has no management experience.
Before making someone a manager, you have to be sure that they have the right outlook, attitude and people skills to do the new job well – and be certain that they will enjoy the extra responsibility and have had enough training and mentoring to handle it.
Making someone a manager because they’re useless at their current role
One of the most celebrated exposers of poor management practice is the cartoonist and author Scott Adams, who invented the long-suffering employee Dilbert. Key to Adams’ insights – alongside his prior career in American corporates – is the stream of real-life corporate lunacies emailed to him surreptitiously by oppressed office workers. In his bestselling book The Dilbert Principle, Adams identified that promotions can be used to remove the least competent people from those productive teams key to a business’s success, ‘promoting them out of harm’s way’ by shifting them to management positions. Clearly, any organisation that thinks management is a sensible dumping-ground for incompetents deserves to go under.
‘Promoting’ a has-been into a meaningless position
This is a variation of the Dilbert Principle which pretends to promote burned out or out-of-favour executives into backwater positions that may have been dreamed up solely to get them out of the way.
If you turn up to work one day and find you’ve been promoted to VP of Community Impacts, with a windowless office, no PA and no clear job description, you can be fairly sure that a) your organisation is utterly spineless in that it is prepared to prolong your suffering and waste money instead of giving you a sensible package to leave gracefully, b) you can do whatever you like until retirement because nobody’s interested in you anymore, but c) if you really want out all you need do is try to turn your meaningless job into a real one by dragging your former colleagues into meetings you’ve invented, and your name will definitely be on the hit-list for the next austerity cull.
Promoting a ‘flitter’
Flitters are highly plausible, self-obsessed executives whose sole aim in business is to climb up the greasy pole. They have no real interest in any role they perform beyond what that role can do to boost their upward progress. Typical flitters work to a 12- to 18-month schedule before blagging their way into their next undeserved promotion; that’s long enough to not raise suspicions, but short enough to escape before being found out.
Abundant in creative roles where the ability to spout the latest buzzwords can seem to matter more than hard data, the flitter starts each new role by identifying flaws (real or imagined) in the status quo, engineers a root-and-branch disruption of policy and processes in the name of ‘innovation’, proclaims the result to be a massive success using carefully selected qualitative assessments, and then skedaddles before the medium-term hard data reveal that it was all smoke and mirrors. Flitters tend not to stay too long in the same organisation, as even very dim businesses will eventually notice that their ‘rising star’ is delivering nothing but serial disruption and a bunch of stalled initiatives. Don’t fall for it – the best way to expose the flitter’s cynical shallowness is to make them stick around to clear up the mess they created. Suggesting they go for a promotion in another division of your firm is just being mean.
Promoting someone one step too far
First formally identified by Laurence J. Peter in 1969, the Peter Principle posits that organisations will continually promote executives until they are finally promoted to a role they just don’t have the capability to perform effectively.
The trick, of course, is to stop promoting the executive one step earlier, when in theory they are in their optimum role; but that requires careful assessment, and treating every promotion as a significant strategic move that requires hard evidence about the candidate’s suitability for the role.
Which, if done rigorously and professionally, would eliminate all of the train wrecks identified above…
