Promoting Experience, Not Abilities
It never ceases to amaze that seemingly progressive companies still have, ahem, ‘guidelines’ for how long an individual must be in a particular role prior to being considered for a promotion. Unless you’re running a prison, time should have no bearing on your decision to move someone beyond their existing role. (Though in fairness, it may feel like just that to the people in the organization.)
photo by daniel james
I touched on how ridiculous this practice is by equating to the sports world several months ago, but I wanted to take a deeper look at why this practice is far dumber than it sounds.
- Weeding out your stars. The best people want to be challenged. They want to learn new things and be forced to step up their game in order to succeed. If you’re bright, highly effective at what you do but aren’t challenged and have no prospects of being challenged until you log the requisite service time then you aren’t going to stick around. Good people have options. Bad companies do not.
- Losing your edge. Service time often comes along with a checklist whereby various tasks need to have been completed. All this translates into stocking your company full of passive bureaucrats who accept that ‘that’s the way things are.’ If you’re looking to succeed within your industry you have to constantly be redefining the rules of the game in order to fit your strengths. Success is rarely bred from people who accept the status quo.
- Breeding helplessness. It doesn’t take too many repetitions for one to learn new behavior. If after knocking a couple projects out of the park and wildly succeeding there is no reward then that extra effort will rapidly diminish. Other than personal pride, what’s the point of doing excellent work if it’s not rewarded? Promotions based on service time are an implicit statement to your employees that it doesn’t matter how well they do so long as they do it for a long time. You’ve completely taken an employee’s control over their own destiny out of their hands. That helplessness rarely concocts innovative solutions, creates new ideas or pushes ahead. (See Motor Vehicles, Department of)
- Failing to develop home-grown talent. Why bother coaching your stars if they still have 24-months prior to even being considered for doing more? It provides such a convenient out for managers that they’ll inevitably grab it. Coaching is hard. It isn’t rewarded. And it takes time away from doing the ‘real work.’ In the long run you’ll feel as though you have to keep hiring from outside to fill the gaps in your organization because you didn’t spend the time early on to fill those gaps. You also don’t truly understand what you have in your talent pool because you haven’t pushed it.
Feel free to disagree and tell me how wrong I am, but this is a mindset that I just can’t seem to understand. The more I try, the more frustrated I get. Over to you…
No related posts.
