Promoting an Employee To Manager – Who to Choose & Why
Promoting an employee to manager is a very big deal. A great manager enables and increases team performance. A poor manager reduces team performance and increases team costs. Choosing to promote the right person is a very big deal for you, the team and the business.
How you assess if an employee has the right attitude, attributes and skills to be a successful manager is what we are covering today. Very importantly, delivering great results as a contributor or employee does not mean they will be a good manager. The skills that make a star employee are very different from the skills and attributes that make a star manager.
Promoting an Employee To Manager – Who to Choose & Why
- 7 behavioural signs they should be displaying
- Why good self-awareness and self-learning skills are vital
- The organisational intelligence they display
Being a good leader is as much about their personal attributes and approach as it is about their people and leadership skills. You can teach skills. It is a lot harder and less likely a person will change their personality, their assumptions, beliefs and everything that influences how they approach and deal with others.
There are big range of people skills needed to lead others effectively and build high performing teams. Having those skills are important but not as important as how your employee choses to use them.
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7 behavioural signs to look for when promoting an employee to manager
- They put in effort to proactively help others improve and be better
- The employee puts the team before themselves
- The individual has positive energy and raises others up, not puts them down
- They are interested in learning and improving themselves
- The individual is confident in themselves, and they like themselves i.e. they don’t need others to make them feel valuable or better about themselves
- They are good at listening and respecting others’ views and opinions alongside their own
- The employee demonstrates their interest in and desire to manage and get the best from others
Being a good manager is a demanding role and takes up a lot of energy. Employees with high energy levels are going to cope better and be able to do more for their team than those with low energy levels. Good energy levels are important to do a great job as a manager.
Towards the end I will share different ways to find out about and assess each of the seven traits and behavioural signs we have just gone through.
look for those employees with good self-awareness and self-learning skills
Employees want to follow leaders that help them, that make them better, more confident, more capable etc. As a minimum, employees need to feel they are better off with the leader they have, compared to having no leader.
It is very hard to lead others with any credibility if you are unable to lead and manage yourself. Self-awareness is a crucial skill to enable self-management. For example, when you know what your hot buttons are, you can manage your reaction when they are pushed. When you are conscious of your values, your assumptions, your preferences, your insecurities, your beliefs etc, then you are much more able to choose how they influence your decisions, actions and behaviours and of course, those around you. Having good self-awareness is very important to manage others well.
Equally important is the ability to self-learn. For instance, does your employee look to learn from all the experiences they have – the good and the bad. Do they blame others for mistakes, or do they look at what they could have done better, even if it is not their fault. Do they proactively make the time to read books, watch videos and take courses to improve their skills? Do they learn from their own mistakes and the mistakes of others. Or do they rely on you to spoon feed them?
When you promote an employee to manager, they are going to have to learn or improve a whole range of skills. They have to be good at self-learning to be able to learn quickly.
when promoting an employee to manager, work out how good is their organisational intelligence
The complexity of a manager’s role keeps increasing in today’s workplace. Managers have a very important role to play in terms of:
- Making the decisions that have a bigger impact on the organisation
- Prioritising which work they and their team does to maximise the value created
- Co-ordinating work between teams and across functions
- Being a team player within the management ranks – i.e. supporting and helping peers and more senior managers achieve company goals
To do this well, I think potential managers should be demonstrating the potential to or actually doing:
- Being able to see and understand the bigger picture so they can best contribute to the wider goals
- Be able to join the dots to create solutions and opportunities for their team and the wider business
- Think systematically – recognising how interconnected every part of the business is and solving problems with the bigger picture in mind as well as looking at the detail.
The bigger the company, the more important organisation intelligence becomes to do an effective job as a manager.
5 tips on how to try to assess each of these areas
Do as much as you can to observe the employee you are thinking of promoting to manager and assess them based on their decisions, actions and behaviours. Find out how others experience working with this person. Don’t rely only on what you told by the individual in meetings and through asking questions.
Show me rather than tell me is a very important principle to follow. 5 tips to assess individuals include:
1 – Spend Time Observing
Spend time personally observing the individual interacting with their team members and colleagues. How energetic, enthusiastic, curious and interested at they when working and interacting with others.
2 – Ask Situational Questions
Ask the individual for their opinions, viewpoints and interest in all the areas covered today. Put situational questions to them and ask what they would do. Ask yourself, do their decisions, actions and behaviours align with what they are telling you or are their significant differences.
3 – Outside of Work
Get them to talk about what they do outside of work that contributes to building their management skills and teamwork. Sports captains, leader of interest groups etc are all great indicators of energy and leadership. Dig into the detail so you are sure they do what they tell you.
4 – Get Lots of Feedback
A really important action is to ask multiple team members and colleagues for feedback and opinions about the person in question. Ask people from all levels – above, peers and most importantly below the individual being considered. Run anonymous 360 degree feedback questionnaires as well as chatting with these colleagues. There is nothing wrong with asking the individual for recommendations of who to speak to.
5 – Assess Their Character
Watch out for character traits like the individual not listening to others, poor teamwork, not helping others, those that think they are better than others, those that put others down or point out faults rather than praise their achievements, those that blame others, raise problems without potential solutions and similar. If there is a consistent pattern of any of these types of traits, I suggest not promoting an employee to manager in this situation.
If in doubt, don’t promote. Make sure you investigate carefully and fairly and are very happy with what you receive back before promoting an employee to manager.
In summary
Selecting the employee to promote to manager or those that you externally hire into management positions is probably one of the most important decisions you can make to support yours, the teams and the business’s success.
Great managers are trained and taught. They learn the skills needed to be good at managing others. You are looking for potential not the finished manager, which is why the traits covered today are so important.
[Click for more reading on is your employee ready to be a manager]
Promoting an employee to manager is such an important decision for your team, you, and the business. Most bosses look at the skills a potential manager has – these are easier to identify and use to justify a promotion. Character traits, approaches, viewpoints and similar as much harder to assess yet in my view are much more important. How you use managerial skills is more important than having them. Both are needed for success.
Learn more about developing the mindset, approach and skills to be a very successful manager.
