Transcript
Leadership is the most important factor that determines the success or failure of an organization. And that’s why promotions are so important.
The problem is we often do them wrong. And because we do them wrong, that’s why we have such low employee engagement worldwide. That’s why many businesses fail. That’s why many employees are demotivated and so many people are disenchanted with business.
It’s because we promote poorly and put poor leaders in the organization, and because of that poor leadership it affects everything negatively. We’re going to talk about ways that we do promotions poorly, ways we do them wrong so that you can avoid them so that you can do them right.
Mess up to move up – We promote leaders who mess up to get them out
One of the biggest mistakes we make when it comes to promoting leaders is that when they mess up we move them up or move them somewhere else instead of dealing with their failed leadership.
If you have a sports team and you have a coach doing poorly, they’re not just going to keep moving up, they’re going to move them out because they have a bad coach. But often in businesses and organizations, when someone’s doing poorly as a leader, they either get moved to a different department or they get promoted up to get them out where they’re doing poorly.
But that really makes no sense because if you’re a bad leader here and have high turnover and doing poorly, you’re going to be a bad leader over there as well.
A relative of mine was in the military years back and he said the saying there was, “mess up to move up.” That people would mess up as a leader and to get them out, they’d just promote them or move them.
That’s insane because leadership again is so important. It’s the determining factor of success, yet we keep bad leaders in their organizations instead of moving them out or moving them to a position where they’re not a leader.
Yes, if they’re teachable and wanting to learn, yes, train them in leadership, but if they’re not good leaders, move them out. This applies in business, in nonprofits, in government, in education. If someone’s a bad principal, don’t just move them to another school. They’re going to have the same problems.
Deal with the leadership problem.
We need to stop promoting and moving bad leaders around.
We promote because of one’s educational degree
Second is that we promote for things like their educational degree. Yes, you can learn stuff at an educational institution, but that doesn’t make you a great leader.
Some social organizations require you to have a master’s or so on in some social degree to be able to get some management or so on position. The thing is you may have that degree, but it doesn’t mean you know actually how to lead.
Knowing how to lead is most important in leadership position. Even having a leadership or educational leadership degree doesn’t mean you know how to lead. You don’t hire people just because they have a degree.
You move people into leadership positions because they show that they can lead, or especially in the lower management positions, if they show the desire to learn, and they have that teachable spirit and that humble spirit where they are willing to learn how to lead.
Educational degrees mean nothing when it comes to one’s ability to actually lead, and that’s one big reason we have poor leadership throughout so many organizations.
We promote because of technical ability
Similarly to that, we promote people because they have a great technical ability.
They’re a great individual performer. For example, someone is great at sales. They’re a great salesperson. So people assume, oh, they’re great at sales. They will make a great sales manager. Or they’re great at graphic design. So, oh, well, they’ll be great at managing graphic designers.
Now, it’s not that these people can’t learn if they’re willing to and have that teachable spirit and are humble, but that’s not an automatic transition. Those are different skills. Knowing how to do graphic design has nothing to do with the skill or ability to lead people who do graphic design.
Don’t move someone up just because they are great at a certain job. Move them up because they have leadership ability or they have that teachable spirit and they’re willing to learn how to lead.
We move up the suckups
Another mistake many organizations make when promoting is that they move up the suck ups. Someone is always sucking up to the supervisor, they become friends with them or whatever, and they get moved up because of that.
They don’t actually do a great job. It annoys everybody else who’s doing the work, but these guys get promoted and then these people are left doing the work while these people still do nothing and just spend their time sucking up or being friends with the big bosses.
I have a friend who works for a government organization, and he says it’s that way for them. That the suck ups get moved up, and they’re left doing all the work, and it’s demotivating, and it’s demoralizing.
Don’t do that. Just because someone’s a suck up and seems nice to you doesn’t mean they are actually doing great work or that they actually know how to lead.
With that, when you’re promoting people or moving people to different positions, don’t just talk to their supervisor. Talk to the people who worked under them or who worked with them. People often act different with their supervisor than they do with their peers or with the people below them.
Sometimes again, they’re suck ups. Sometimes they be extra nice. Many people put up a front for their supervisor that they don’t put up for the people around them.
So when you just talk to the supervisor, you may be hiring a jerk, but you don’t know that because you haven’t asked. If you’re looking at moving up a manager, talk to the people who worked under the manager, not just their supervisor.
Find out what kind of leader they were. Those people will give you some of the best information because they’re ones who worked around them. Or if you’re trying to promote someone to a manager position, talk to their peers and see what kind of person they are. Are they a jerk? Are they humble? Are they arrogant? Do they show good traits of what great leadership is?
Don’t just talk to one’s supervisor when considering promoting, talk to those around them and to those who have worked under them.
Management is the only way up
Lastly, management doesn’t need to be the only way up. When management is the only way up to move up in your career, then you end up getting people who really don’t want to be managers, who really don’t want to lead, getting into these positions.
And then they don’t really want to do that work. And that’s how you end up with what Kim Scott says in her book, Radical Candor, “Bosses from Hell.”
When people don’t want that job, they won’t put their effort into doing that job well. And that’s a big way we get bad bosses. As much as possible, you want different pathways up. It’s amazing that we reward people for doing great in a certain job by putting them in a job that has nothing to do with their old job.
If someone moves into a management position, it should be because they want to be a manager, because they want to be a leader, not because they have to.
If someone wants to stay a graphic designer, then there should be pathways, if possible, to stay in the graphic design realm and move up that way. Or programming, or whatever it may be. Management shouldn’t be the default promotion for everything.
As we said in the beginning and throughout, leadership is the determining factor of success of an organization.