Lisa Askwith- Engaging Your People for Success Ep4 S4- Why Promotions without a Career Path can Destroy your Business

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Introduction

So to continue from last week's career paths and development plans in order to retain your people so they grow with the business and stay. We will now focus more on how we can make sure Promotions are fair and transparent and based on performance and are 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 recognition structure, that helps value all of your people, and makes them proud to be part of your business!

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Show Objectives

Today’s show is about 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 our 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 really 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

EPISODE P5.003  Promotions are Based on Performance, not Connections

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 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 we have made it to Stage V - we 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 ability to demonstrate new skills​

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, like with developing career paths in last week’s episode, you need to really understand where you are going as a business in order to make it work.
2-     Then the 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 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

To Plan for your Future Promotion and Business Structure

1. Know your growth plan and create future organizational chart that focuses on positions
2. Create future position descriptions - focus on job demands
3. Instill a Performance Management system that promotes based on performance and details performance expectations, progress
4. Create a job scorecard with success metrics
5. Create Future Position Descriptions
6. Create future organizational chart - focus positions;
7. Create future position descriptions - focus on job demands
8. 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
9. 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: Episode P5.02 Without A Career Path you are Sending Your People Elsewhere to Succeed (15OCT2020)


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Next Show: P5.04 Why Formal Training Programs for Job Demands and CAreer Development Retain Your People and Improve your Culture (29OCT20)

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.

You can connect with Lisa on any of her platforms

LinkedIn Lisa Askwith - Director - Apex BRS
https://www.apexbrs.com/
https://www.facebook.com/lisa.askwith

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