How to Turn Your Employees Into Managers
Where do you find the perfect manager? Hiring a manager from within your current employees is the obvious answer. But is it as simple as just promoting that employee to manager and setting him or her loose? Most certainly not! Managing is a special kind of leadership role and it can be challenging to develop someone from an employee mindset to a manager mindset. Here’s a couple ideas on how to make this a more effective transition.
In most small businesses, formal management training is rare. If employees show themselves to be good workers, they get promoted whether they are ready to manage or not. This process can be unpredictable at best. Rather than plucking employees from their current job and dropping them cold turkey directly into management, you can begin training your employees to be managers right where they’re at in their current job, and then add more formal training when you transition them to a full manager role.
The basic principle to making this approach work is to consider the qualities of a good manager, and then provide employees the opportunity to build those qualities now. Management skills can be broken down into five basic areas:
Self-Deprecating Skills
The ability of an employee to evaluate themselves to identify strengths and weaknesses, without cringing at criticism or making excuses.
Inter-Personal Skills
The ability of an employee to manage, motivate, and communicate with small groups and individuals to develop people to be their best.
Corporate Skills
This is the skills and attitude to look at the bigger picture and do what’s necessary to make your business more successful. Basically, thinking like a business owner.
Communication Skills
The ability to clearly communicate to others what needs to be done without too much room for interpretation. Along with the ability to communicate, is the listen.
Stable Demeanor
The ability to remain calm when all else around you is falling apart is a skill that cannot always be taught.
Having all five of these skills and abilities naturally inherent, or at least to a level where further training can develop them is necessary for every manager. So how do you go about identifying and growing these three key skills in your employees?
Encourage your key employees to begin to think about the bigger picture issues, and to understand where the business is going and how certain decisions will affect the business and the employees. Give responsibility and corresponding authority to your employees and watch those future managers rise to the occasion. Avoid micromanaging because you can squash someones inherent abilities if don’t allow them to blossom.
Becoming a manager without these skills at least partially in place before they are place in a position of leadership is a recipe for disaster.
By helping your employees to see themselves as leaders no matter what their position or whether they even work full-time, you instill an understanding of what leadership entails. Leadership skills should already be evident when an opportunity for promotion to management comes along. Once you have that foundation in a potential manager, you can then begin to develop those abilities with formal and even informal training. You can see more on leadership by visiting our earlier management blog: https://blog.infiniumhr.comleadership/
Infinium offers new Manager Leadership Skills and HR 101 for Managers training at no cost to our clients. If we can be of any assistance, please don’t hesitate to contact our HR experts at info@infinumhr.com