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Promotion for Employee
by Dr. Lynne
Curry
Question:
What’s the best way to tell an internal candidate she will not
get the promotion she wants?
We have a great
administrative assistant, “Brenda,” who really wants to become
our office manager. All of our employees like her. During the
past year, Brenda’s tried to handle a lot of the office manager
duties. Unfortunately, she’s simply too nice to do all that we
need an office manager to do.
No crew of
employees is perfect and we have our share of petty problems –
the woman who’s always “just a few” minutes late in the morning,
the employees who do good work but surf the Internet or
chit-chat when bored and so on. When our company was smaller,
one of us could handle the situation; but we’ve grown and now
need someone “closer to the action” to take over routine
discipline.
When we
announced we intended to hire an office manager, Brenda asked if
she could have the job. We explained to her that if she wanted
to function as office manager, she would need to handle
situations such as “Kim” consistently arriving late and “Angie”
making personal calls when she got upset with a customer. Brenda
said she’d understood and said she’d talk with Kim and Angie
right away. The next day, when Kim again arrived late, we asked
Brenda if she’d had a chance to meet with Kim. She said, “Well I
talked to her but she’s having trouble getting her kids to
school and she gets here as soon as she can. I didn’t want to
hurt her feelings.” When we asked “What about Angie?” she said,
“Well, she got upset when I talked about her calls and said she
didn’t make that many.”
We’ve caucused
as owners and decided we need to hire a “real” office manager.
How do we tell Brenda so we don’t lose her as an enthusiastic
employee?
Answer:
To be fair to Brenda, you haven’t given her a complete chance to
succeed. You’ve explained “what” you want her to do but not
taught her “how” to handle disciplinary discussions that travel
sideways. Given how motivated Brenda appears to be, if you
mentor her in how to effectively oral counsel, she might be able
to move Kim past “as soon as I can” to “on time” and Angie from
“not that many” to “not on work time.”
On the other
hand, your and Brenda’s view of the office manager role may
differ. Some new supervisors think they can simply raise a
concern and employees automatically improve, not realizing that
employees with bad habits often consider poor performance
acceptable. Once these new supervisors realize the headaches
that accompany their promotion, many long to return to co-worker
status.
If Brenda still
wants the job but you decide she lacks the “intestinal
fortitude” needed to succeed, do your best to help her feel you
aren’t demoting her by hiring someone else. Let her know that
after evaluating the situation you’d prefer that she work as
part of an office management team with someone who can bring
those disciplinary skills into your company. Tell her you’re
willing to help her develop the skills she needs to qualify for
the next upgrade to manager and will ask the new office manager
to mentor her.
Further, make
sure she knows how much you value her and the ways in which
she’s gone above and beyond her normal duties in the last year.
You can accomplish this if you know what mattered most to her in
getting the promotion. Was it salary? If so, can you give her a
small raise to recognize the ways in which she’s performed above
and beyond for the last year and to acknowledge her continued
value to your firm? Is it the chance to advance? If so, send
Brenda to training so that she can move into another
semi-managerial position when one opens up? Given how others in
the firm feel about Brenda, you stand to win by keeping her on
your team. Is it recognition? If so, can you give her a new job
title and several senior responsibilities such as developing
standard operating procedures for helping your company run more
smoothly? In short, turn this from a situation in which you
potentially lose Brenda to one in which both your company and
Brenda win. |
