Published
Articles
Originally
Published in The Business Journal of CNY.
PROMOTING
WITHOUT PLANNING
One of the most
prolific, and most costly mistakes I see in small business today,
is what I call "random promoting". Often people with no management
experience, and no formal management training, are cast or forced
into management and leadership positions.
Business success
depends on all of the human components of the business cranking
on all cylinders simultaneously, irrelevant of the needs and priorities
of the company at any specific time.
In today's robust
economy, managers and lead people are at a premium, and getting
work out often becomes more critical and necessary than quality,
and surely training. The problem is, the quality issue always catches
up with you, as does the training.
It is not fair
or reasonable to put people without experience in a position they
have no understanding of. Previous management experience in no way
guarantees any positive results, other than giving you a frame of
reference to look back at. In fact, in some instances, people with
no experience in management, but good common sense, evolve into
good managers over a period of time. Period of time is critical
to remember. Give them the time they need to develop. There are
exceptions to every rule.
If production
pressures force these "miscasting" situations, then you owe it to
your company, and to the team and the person, to train them. They
will run into situations they have never seen before, or worse yet,
have seen, but always been on the other side of. How can they make
the right decision? Managers promoted from the ranks are not in
an enviable position. To be effective they have to go through a
180 degree mindset change.
Rarely will
these people ever tell you they are unqualified at promotion time,
or even that they need help. They put faith in your judgement of
them. Kind of a catch-22 isn't it?
Concurrent with
their elevation, they must be given help and training in dealing
with all of these new situations. Generally this is the worst time
for help to come from others in the company, since the very fact
that workloads are often at all-time highs, other managers are also
maxed out, and generally have little time or patience to help the
new manager. They have their own problems.
Training is
necessary for the new manager, for the benefit of the company, for
the employees reporting to the new manager, and for the manager
themselves. For lack of other options, more and more of the business
world is moving towards professional coaches to save money. Coaches
can work one-on-one with the new manager and bring them to the highest
levels faster than seminars, tapes, and all other conventional methods.
This is because they work with that person's individual skill sets,
and their specific strengths and weaknesses. This is not generalist
help. It is person-specific.
Think of the
irony of how we focus so much on performance reviews, long discussions
of issues to be addressed, goals set for the future, and then, we
leave the employee to figure out how to get there by himself. Every
company profits by providing whatever tools are necessary to get
that person from point A (review day) to point B (next review day).
Without tools, soft or hard, how can any of us do our job? You would
not think of sending out a welder without a torch. Why send a manager
out without the knowledge of how to manage people. This is another
great point to bring in a coach.
Even after the
company settles back to "normalcy", the training rarely gets any
priority. By that time, the manager and the rest of the employees
have accepted the situation for whatever it is, and have decided
by default to settle for mediocrity.
I say this not
only because I am that coach who could help many of these people,
but, more as the advisor, who, being deeply involved with so many
companies, has seen the damage done by not training and working
with key employees. Seeing the cost, and waste incurred by no action,
is an eye-opener. It is often overwhelming. You can never go back
and recoup those costs, especially the "soft" costs such as customer
and quality issues. Bad habits, once developed, take much longer
to break, than starting with a new manager in the beginning.
In much the
same vain, it would be easier for me often to create a new company,
than to fix one that has developed too many bad habits. That 2 step
process doubles the time, and the cost.
In today's competitive
business environment, getting these managers up to speed, and on
track, is a necessity, not a luxury. Otherwise, it impacts the remainder
of the business. Technical skills must be complemented by people
skills, and the ability to maximize all of the manager's resources,
which are predominately people. In fact, technical skills, once
one becomes a manager, take a back seat to teaching skills, and
the ability to work with and through others, along with team development.
In today's tight
labor market, it is almost always less expensive to "fix" the issues
with existing managers, than to go through the same cycle all over
again with a new "trainee", perhaps to end up in the same position.
If a new manager
loses respect from his new staff, peers, and subordinates in the
first 3 months, they will rarely recover. The learning curve has
been sent off-track. Often too far.
As you build
your management team, invest in them, and allow them to begin contributing
in a positive fashion as soon as possible, rather than waiting for
a crisis. Don't ever assume there are born managers. There are very
few of those. Much like the way you learned how to run a business,
there were times when you wished there had been someone there to
guide you through the process, rather than learn by trial and error.
If you went through that experience, you know exactly what I am
talking about, and the high costs attached to it.
Dennis Hoppe is President of Change Management Implementation, Inc. in Brockport, NY. He has been a small business advisor to owners of hundreds of companies since 1989. Visit his web sites at www.dhoppe.com and www.hmcexecutivecoaching.com, or call him at 800-724-3525.
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