The Ugly Middle

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How productive are your employees? What criteria determine who fills the supervisor/management positions in your organization?

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There are a handful of common practices in business that are responsible for keeping an organization functioning at a consistently mediocre level. Ineffective meetings, poor communications and non-existent goals/metrics are prime examples of this. Easily one of the biggest causes of organizational mediocrity however is the promotional practices of most companies.

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These commonly go like this: Recognize who the best front-line workers are over a period of time (or whoever outlasted the typical employee turnover) and then go and make those people supervisors over their former peers. Then if they keep everyone in-line and somewhat more productive for any length of time, they get promoted into middle management. There they’ll find a combination of poor communicators, insecure figure-heads and compulsive ‘yes’ people. If they can stay neutral yet efficient enough, they’ll make it to top management soon enough.

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So what’s the problem here? Well, the best frontline worker doesn’t necessarily have the relational tools or psychological transformation to be a good supervisor; no matter how much of a super-worker they were. Most folks don’t readily have the skill set to motivate others to work as hard as they used to at a given task and so they end-up doing a lot of their former frontline work while also submitting reports, resolving conflict and the other supervisorial tasks that pile-up overnight. What’s missing in the typical promotion system is that there is no advancement strategy in the organization that is developing the right leadership abilities matched to an employee’s responsibilities within the organization. So you might somehow get the right people in the right positions but it’s almost guaranteed that the right skills and attitude for those positions weren’t developed at any point in the promotional process. This ends-up costing an organization tons by way of lost innovation, excellence and growth.

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Take a look at the diagram below and then decide to do two things right now:
1) Determine what skills and attitudes are best for each position within your organization. Look to folks that are/have been exemplary in particular positions to help put together a list of what would be ideal for any given position.
2) Put plans in place to address this topic in your organization this month; even if it’s merely just a brainstorming of questions at this point. Please contact us if you want some pointers on how to do this.
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If you would like to discuss this concept of strategic leadership development more and the many positive results it will bring to your company, go ahead and e-mail us here. Hey, if it was easy, every business (big or small) would be doing it habitually and successfully. I hope you find yourself in that category soon… Talk to you next week!