Ep 5 S6 Lisa Askwith- Engaging Your People for Success - Nuture your People and Remove Bias in Promotions

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Introduction

To continue from last week's discussion on how to make your business attract great people, and retain them for as long as possible, we are now going to focus on a key internal area that can really help achieve that, as well as improve your business from within. That is developing your people, and ensuring you have supportive and accessible career paths and development plans in place. Plans which help you remove bias and ensure that your internal promotion can be celebrated rather than ridiculed, can be believed in and seen to be positive and the right fit, rather than causing distrust and disengagement. In order to both retain your great people, and help them grow with the business you need more than an incentive scheme and bonuses…..so much more!. I will also focus more on how to make sure Promotions are fair and transparent, and based on performance. Whilst not getting caught up in the toxic trap of being based on connections. This is vital to get right, otherwise mistrust will take over and your business culture will lose its edge. 

Let's stop this from happening and develop promotions, rewards, and a recognition structure that helps value all of your people, and makes them proud to be part of your business! One that can give back to both the business bottom line and the employee engagement levels. In reality this is not a hard or onerous task, but one that you must be aware needs to be achieved, and once done it will take on a life of its own that will help drive your culture and engage your people.

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Show Objectives

Today’s show is about providing your people with a platform to further their success, allowing them to be engaged, and feel valued, then it is about how you as a leader make this work behind the scenes for your business and your people. This is where we go into topics such as top grading and putting in a formal performance management system. Top grading follows a similar philosophy of the pareto principle or 80/20 rule and allows you to identify and promote your top talent. Promoting top talent based on performance is a win for your company because your best people will continue to move up the career path. When you lead with your best talent, others will either follow suit by seeing what expectations look like or lesser talent will find other, less competitive, employment. 

That is the black and white part of Performance systems, however people are anything but clear cut and all the same. So we will go deeper than just the checkbox methods and really look at how we can instigate strategies and programs that actually meet your peoples core needs of value, respect, interesting work, and recognition. Then we can really develop programs for your business that allow you to stand out as an employer of choice and move forward with a sustainable business model that your people can be proud of. After all it is all about engineering your people for success…….as they are your biggest asset…….. or your worst nightmare!

What You Need to Know

When you top grade your promotions, you intentionally select the top 10% of your employees and groom them for the next level or promote now, then build a profile of them as a basis of your performance management system.

Key Risk- Traditional Hierarchies limit who employees can show their potential and talents to.

Have you created an environment in which all of your employees can be seen and showcase their true talents and abilities. Lack of visibility is the main reason great people get overlooked for promotions- This is costing you more money than you realise. If you can create an environment that allows for true visibility of all of your people then your business will greatly benefit, and your culture will improve exponentially.

Key Issues:

Owner/Manager Perspective

1. How do you transition your company to a performance based promotions system?
2. Many companies set up promotions based on time. When this is the case, there is not much motivation to perform to high standards. 
3. How do you segment your employees in order to identify and determine who is your top 10%?
4. Look at a career from 2 viewpoints - technical and organizational.
5. A small business is challenged by providing a career path - however if you are bringing in consistent revenue then you are a real business and need to think about retention of the best, and attracting the same group because of staffing needs from growth.
6. Develop people technically first - job of management is developing skill mastery,
7. Continue to develop their business skills to make competence complete,
8. Promotion is based on the ability to demonstrate new skills​, allow your people opportunities such as cross department shadowing, cross functional teams and mentoring.
9. How to remove bias and ensure your promotions are not based on friendships only

Key Issues - Employee Perspective:

1. Become competent for your position - identify the final gaps.
2. Become indispensable by taking on the thankless jobs required to make the business work - what is left?
3. Find opportunities to gain exposure for knowledge and skills beyond your position - tell me when I can join innovation teams.

What You Need to Do

To Develop your Promotion Strategy and Development Plans

1. Recognizing your company needs and purpose to identify the type of staff and culture you want for success….without this you will spend a lot of time in order to fail. This is a key first step to get right, you need to really understand where you are going as a business in order to make it work.
2. Top grading of employees and how to achieve it – note more than 1 manager must agree to avoid bias.
3. Communication of grading’s and how to deliver.
4. Training of the leadership team to be accountable for the company philosophy.
5. Ensuring grading’s, and corresponding achievement criteria are open, transparent and accessible to all.
6. Develop options and opportunities so you can retain staff while they are progressing/ waiting for the next opportunity.
7. Make promotions and progression a part of your living culture, by reward, recognition, different opportunities etc
8. Create a culture that focuses on visibility or all talents, ensuring your quiet achievers are not overlooked and lost.

The Workplaces of Tomorrow's Biggest Risk?
Not understanding the needs and values of the next generation of employees. This is key to not only engaging and retaining them, but to also creating and developing rewarding and effective career paths and promotions.
Studies already show that the upcoming Millennial generation have entered the workforce and feel more disengaged than either Generation X or the Baby Boomers as they feel that their need for fair pay and meaning are not being met.


To Plan for your Future Promotion and Business Structure

1. Know your growth plan and create future organizational chart that focuses on positions
2. Instill a Performance Management system that promotes based on performance and details performance expectations, progress
3. Create a job scorecard with success metrics
4. Create future position descriptions - focus on job demands
5. Understand where your next generation of employees is coming from and their needs
6. Coach your employees. Create a Training Plan for the new Positions
   1. Formal classroom for technical, human, and conceptual
   2. Delegate by creating "boss for a day" where you give them a position 1 level higher to understand the new demands
7. Formalize Training
   1. Technical Skills - driven by technology and position descriptions;
   2. Human Skills - driven by management requirements and teamwork;
   3. Conceptual Skills - driven by ownership demands of strategic thinking and innovation

Shows
Previous: EP4 Winning the war for Talent
Next: EP6 Leadership Mindset- Build Yours now!


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Written by Lisa Askwith
Director of ApexBRS | ApexBRS, Regional Director of See Global Media, Chair of  EGN Singapore, and Associate Professor Cambridge Corporate University | At the Age of Change, providing the HR component of the Global Executive MBA and BBA. Lisa has worked for some of the largest companies in the world and successfully led restructures and change management programs in order to improve the bottom line through engaging the people for success, while developing exceptional leaders who can make a positive impact on Culture and long term business sustainability.

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