Selecting the right people for promotion sounds incredibly obvious. So how do promotion decisions end badly? The solution lies in setting robust job role benchmarks which identify the behaviours and skills that you want at every level of your organisation. When this is in place you will:

• give confidence to your teams with an accurate promotion strategy
• promote on measurable merit rather than gut-feel
• widen your talent pool beyond the obvious candidates.

To improve employee retention, take a strategic approach to keeping hold of your talented people. As bolting the office door isn’t an option, organisations need to get their promotion decisions right first time.

Making sure that you select the right people for promotion sounds incredibly obvious. No one would actively consider the wrong people. So, how do promotion decisions end badly? The answer lies with decisions based on gut feel, past rather than potential performance, and through not using robust job role benchmarks. In addition, if you don’t match the human needs of the team to the ability and approach of their proposed leader, you have the recipe for a disastrous promotion.

Take a hard look at who and how you promote. How do these decisions affect your workplace relationships? Is the culture continuously moving forward, adapting to the needs and wants of the people within it in order to meet your organisational objectives? Or has it stalled, with attitudes prevailing from the dark ages? Without this ‘hard look’ you run the risk of promoting the same-old-same-old and further entrenching a cycle of outdated and even toxic behaviour. People learn from what they see at work. Make sure that you promote the behaviour and skills that you want to filter through every level of your organisation.

Work with us to identify, develop and retain your talented people

Of course no one wants to promote the wrong people, but it is easy for promotion pathways to become entrenched in outdated practice. The same mis-steps repeated time after time. The shakeup of the working world, the squeeze on margins and the risk of expensive avoidable workplace disputes, mean that organisations need to get their promotional decisions right.

We help organisations of every size and sector, from the start-up to the well-established, to create and optimise their succession planning strategies. Talk to our team of expert consultants and coaches to learn how we can do this for you.