Promoted for the wrong reason

This may sound odd but too many managers get promoted for the wrong reason. They get promoted because they’re good at their job. The problem is that they don’t get promoted because they’ll be good managers.

This can have a seriously detrimental effect on their businesses. Let’s say you have a really good salesperson and you promote her to be a sales manager. The very skills that made her good at sales contradict the skills necessary to be a good manager. Good salespeople tend to be solo operators, Lone Rangers. They are motivated by closing the deal, winning recognition for their sales numbers, large commissions, and praise for their sales acumen. They are interested in personal glory, winning, beating out the competition. They’re the rock stars. Now let’s look at the skill set of the sales manager.  Y’know, the one responsible for herding all those rock stars into a band.

The sales manager must be good at team building, collaboration, self-sacrifice,  and making sure everybody gets across the finish line successfully. Exactly the opposite of everything that made this person successful in their past job. So what happens? The polar opposite of win-win (funny how nobody ever talks about “lose-lose”), which is zero sum. And zero is what you’ll wind up getting from the team unlucky enough to have this prima donna as the manager. Because now you have an unprepared manager who is poorly motivated to manage the team and you’ve lost your best salesperson to boot!

You do need someone with good sales skills, or whatever technical skill in which the department is involved, to have the credibility to lead the team. Look just a little further down the food chain. Pick your second or third best salesperson. Do whatever necessary assessments you have to do to find out which one might be motivated more by the success of the team instead of individual recognition. Make that person the new manager. Then, to make sure your top person doesn’t feel snubbed, meet with that salesperson and tell her that she wouldn’t have wanted the position anyway because she couldn’t afford the cut in pay!

2 thoughts on “Promoted for the wrong reason

  1. It is appropriate time to make some plans for the future and it’s time to be happy. I’ve read this post and if I could I desire to suggest you some interesting things or tips. Maybe you can write next articles referring to this article. I wish to read even more things about it!

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