"The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." "The ...

MANAGEMENT
Is Your Employee Ready to Be a Manager?
By Deb Thompson, TG & Associates
When a managerial position opens up, it is usually
an opportunity to move a top performer into the
position. No one would argue that promoting from within
sends a strong message to the rest of the company about
investing in people and cultivating management talent.
Unfortunately, when it comes to actual qualifications,
current job performance is given greater weight than the
competencies required for a managerial position – most
notably, management traits and/or experience.
The fact that individual job performance and management
are two entirely different sets of competencies too often
gets ignored. Before you know it, you have someone in the
position that doesn’t know the first thing about managing a
group of people.
Dr. Laurence Peter, in his popular book, The Peter
Principle, states, “in a hierarchically structured
administration, people tend to be promoted up to
their level of incompetence.”
The principle is based on the
observation that in such an
organization new employees
typically start in the lower ranks,
but when they prove to be
competent in the task to which they
are assigned, they get promoted
to a higher rank. And usually the
higher rank can only be achieved in
a managerial position. This process
of climbing up the ladder can go
on indefinitely until the employee
reaches a position where he or she
is no longer competent. At that
moment, when it is too late, the
failure of the promotion process is
finally recognized.
What seemed like
such a great idea is now
a nightmare. Where
do you go from here?
Having the wrong
Deb Thompson
person in management
could actually destroy a
department or even an entire company. But what can you do
now? One option is to hope that the new manager becomes
so frustrated and fed up being in a position they know they
are struggling with that he or she will quit. Another option is
that the manager bides his or her time until they accumulate
enough “evidence” to withstand a lawsuit and then terminate
the person. A third option is the offering of a mutually
agreeable severance package to expedite the entire process.
In this case it would be wise to have this person sign a waiver
that no future lawsuits would be filed.
In any of the above scenarios the end-result is that you
have lost a person whom you
considered a top performer at
one time because you promoted
them to a role for which they
were not suited. Many companies
have recognized this dilemma by
creating two career paths: One
path is for managerial growth;
the other is for an individual
contributor. Both offer similar
pay grades and salaries, therefore,
it is not necessary for them to
become a manager to advance
within the company.
But how can you do a better job
of preventing the “Peter Principle
Syndrome” from happening to
18 PARTNERS Summer 2011