Help your team member to gain a promotion
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Helping to develop the talents of people in your team, seeing them move on to new roles and challenges, succeeding even to the point where their achievements may outstrip yours is one of the most rewarding things you can achieve as a manager. It’s one of the most valuable contributions you can make to someone else’s life and will enable you to attract new talent to your team. So, if this is new territory for you here are some tips to get you started.
1. What are their particular talents?
What is the potential you can see and why? Does your team member realise their talents and abilities? If not, help them see for themselves where they excel and how they can use their strengths to build a successful career.
2. How are they currently perceived by their peers and other managers?
Do they see additional strengths and abilities to you? If so, share this insight with your team member to help build their confidence. Or perhaps they see weaknesses you don’t? Again, share this with your team member so they understand their impact with different people and settings and can use this insight to enhance their development plans. Or are there any past mistakes to overcome? Help them plan how to approach similar issues differently, proving to others a lesson has been learnt, feedback heard and understood.
3. What are their career aspirations?
Have they got a realistic development plan in place to achieve these? If you are unsure ask them to talk through their current plans and tell you how they will address issues you can see but they may have overlooked. Sometimes verbalising our plans can show us the flaws in our thinking – so you may need to do little more than provide that vital sounding board.
Or perhaps they are a really talented person but lack confidence in their abilities and so their aspirations seem too timid. In which case, work through step one with them, encourage them to gain feedback from others on their contribution to the team or other projects so they can see just how much they have to offer the organisation.
4. To what extent is your team member able to demonstrate their talents in their current role?
If this is limited, what can you do to help them broaden their reach and impact? Perhaps there are tasks you can delegate to them or assign them to projects that will raise their profile.
5. Brand and reputation
What is your team member doing to build awareness of their interests, strengths and achievements amongst colleagues? Have they thought to let people know what they are interested in moving on to? Do they see and take advantage of opportunities to drip feed stories about what they are currently doing and achieving at work? If not, help them brainstorm what those opportunities are and how they might use them without feeling as if they are simply boasting.
6. Given the stage in their career, what other managers would it be good for your team member to work for?
Some managers might be more suitable than others in ensuring your team member continues to grow in confidence and experience, supporting and nurturing their talent in much the same way you have.
7. What range of promotion opportunities are there?
In each case help them plan ahead and find out:
- what key skills and experience will be needed to be successful at interview
- what, if any, gaps are there and how might they address these or demonstrate these don’t override what they can offer/bring to the role
This will make sure that they feel prepared and confident when opportunities do present themselves.
I recently heard a story of how a manager helped their highly talented team member gain the promotion they deserved by getting them to reassess the way they interacted with others, building the self-belief that had been lacking and delegating opportunities for them to play a different, more senior, role in meetings. In this way, they finally shrugged off the old ‘graduate trainee’ image that had followed them around for too long.
TAKE AWAY
Building and supporting the talent in your team is one of the most rewarding things you can do as a manager and will pay you and the organisation rich dividends in return. You can do this by building their self-confidence, self-awareness, their brand and reputation, development plans that support their aspirations and delegating opportunities to help them shine.