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How do you know an employee is ready for a promotion?

If your business is going to grow, you’re going to need to promote people to more responsibility.

For some business owners this is a tough decision.

How will you know they’re ready? How long will it take them to get up to speed in their new role? What happens if you’re wrong about them?

All of these questions can keep even the most hardened entrepreneur up at night.

When we advise small business owners on this, we focus on five key things:

  1. The employees track record to date
  2. How the employee feels about the new opportunity
  3. Working with the employee to develop the new role to fit them, not forcing the employee to fit the role
  4. Setting clearly written expectations around performance, measurement, responsibilities, support and accountability
  5. Ensure they have a coach or mentor

Let’s look at each element separately.

Track Record

Obviously you’ve been impressed with this employee or you wouldn’t be considering them for promotion, however, let’s look at some important elements of performance often overlooked that can have a huge impact on their success or failure in their new role.

  • Are they willing to ask for help?
  • How do they manage stress?
  • What does their ego look like – hero or humble?
  • Their relationship to learning

These are not your typical areas of concern when promoting. Typically we’re concerned with performance at their current position, do they show “leadership” ability and smarts. Those are still important, just dive in a little deeper to see what kind of person they really are.

The Employee

When the employee is offered the promotion, or even when the discussion of its possibility comes up, they’re usually too excited to really give the opportunity the full reflection it needs. Make sure you take the time to have multiple conversations about what the job really looks like including your expectations and what your employee wants out of the position.

Not every promotion fits and that’s ok. Let your employee know that if they don’t feel up to it after careful consideration and conversation, that they’re still important to you and the business and that there will still be other opportunities.

The Role

If you and the employee do decide the promotion is a good fit, take some time together to tailor the role as much as possible to the strengths of the employee.

This is important because it shows how much you value them, and it will allow the employee to get comfortable and get up to speed quicker.

Setting the Ground Rules

This is probably the most important step. This is also where we’ve seen what looked like a perfect situation go south quickly.

By putting everything in writing and having thorough discussions around expectations, performance, measurement, responsibilities, support and accountability, you take away most of the problematic areas that can cause a new promotion to fail.

Put me in coach

By having someone either internal or external working with your newly promoted employee on a regular basis, you have the ability to accelerate their growth and head off any unforeseen situations or habits.

There is no guarantee that if you follow this advice that your employee will be successful, but if you don’t, we can guarantee you they won’t be.

Remember to always keep an open and honest dialogue with your employee and let them know its ok to make mistakes and to ask for help. You both have the same goal; their success, so let them know you’re in this together.