Running a business as the Managing Director is no small feat. You have to manage a group of department heads that each have their own respective teams to run.
Everyone is busy, and there isn’t usually enough time in the day to get things done.
Some managers are less experienced than others either in the workforce or in the industry that your business operates within. In a few cases, they may have been promoted from inside the department without previous managerial experience or training.Here we look at the pros of promoting in-house and how you can go about doing this.
Promoting from Within Has Pros and Cons
Promoting from within encourages loyalty to the company. It also means the person promoted has a unique insight into the role because before being the manager they worked in some of the lower-level positions. However, it’s not always practical or possible to promote this way.
Sometimes you’ll want to make a big splash by bringing a heavy hitter and touting them as someone important to the company. But this is done at the expense of some employees who feel it was their turn for a promotion and they then become disgruntled because they feel overlooked. In turn, this can see some of the better employees leaving for pastures new rather than waiting around for a possible future promotion that might never come.
Allowing Staff to Become Ready for Greater Responsibilities
In some cases, a staff member looks ready for greater responsibility as a team leader or future department head, but lacks any experience as a manager on their CV. For these staff members, they shouldn’t be discounted.
While they may not possess formal education that includes management on the curriculum – or it was all theory without any practical experience – that doesn’t mean they’re incapable of learning how to become a leaderthemselves. Often, they just need to be given a chance instead of purely sticking to people who already have a degree and get to leapfrog right over them even if they too lack managerial experience.
Creating a Culture of Internal Staff Growth Lays the Foundation
Department heads need to be encouraged by the direct reports to learn to take decisions themselves, rather than only ever taking direction. While staff still need to follow reasonable instructions and complete their assigned tasks, there’s also an opportunity for managers at all levels within an organisation to encourage those people under their care to use their initiative.
Initiative can come in many forms. While some companies tend to stick dogmatically to rigid procedures saying, “we do it this way because that’s the way it’s always been done”, other people from MD level down to the management levels need to be open to fresh ideas.
It’s not necessary for every idea to be great – quite often they won’t be and perhaps might demonstrate a naiveté or a lack of depth in understanding – but the fact that the staff member is eager to get more involved in both the company and their personal development speaks volumes for where they’ll be in a few years’ time.
Only by pursuing growth for all staff members wherever possible, exploring new ideas and trying new approaches, can a team rise together in talent and overall capability. Not doing so leads to a stagnancy that can eventually be the undoing of the company, or at least lead to a lower staff retention rate combined with higher recruitment costs to replace staff.
Teaching Leaders to Become Nurturers of Staff with Promise
Nurturing staff over time is the role of the Managing Director along with individual department heads. People need to feel that their contribution to the company m atters and that they won’t be stagnant. Otherwise, their career won’t progress, and many will grow frustrated at this reality.
How can managers achieve this if they don’t feel like they are capable of performing in an executive coaching role for junior managers and mentoring for other staff? The BCF Group provide executive coaching and mentoring through their ILM Level 7 Coaching course. Through their ILM Level 7 Executive Coaching Courses, executives learn over a 12-month period how to become an excellent tutor and sounding board for staff that report to them.
The ILM Level 7 Certificate in Executive Coaching and Mentoring program is designed specifically for executives in the UK who feel that they wish to improve upon certain people skills and techniques to work well with others. Rather than being a short course that is a flash in the pan with a flurry of quick techniques that are quickly forgotten, the ILM Level 7 Qualifications in Executive Coaching and Mentoring require the completion of three work-based assignments after the taught element of the programme, which will take about 3 hours per week for 12 months, depending upon each individual’s pace of working. The BCF Group offer full tutor support at no additional cost during this period.
When armed with an ILM Level 7 Coaching Certificate, an executive will have enough self-confidence to move into a supportive and nurturing role for staff who need it.
The Challenge of Leadership
Leaders at all levels face the challenge of knowing when to encourage staff to become more than they’re currently showing or capable of, and when not to. Putting pressure on people who aren’t ready for more responsibility is usually a mistake. It takes a keen observer to see the potential in an employee and imagine a career path for them that perhaps they never thought possible for themselves. For leaders at all levels of an organisation, encouraging staff to commit to the company often requires being willing to produce a realistic promotional path over time.
Developing staff into more than what they were on day one isn’t easy. It takes patience and a longer time perspective than most leaders imagine. However, to a large extent, people are the engine that sees the company perform better, grow faster than the competition, and weather bad economic times too. When failing to invest in your staff by providing training to managers to help nurture employees’ development, a shortfall is created between what’s needed and what’s possible. And this isn’t good for any business that relies on a committed workforce.
