Meet Michael Scott.
Michael is an outstanding paper salesman. He has a list of clients a mile long, several awards, and could sell non-recycled paper to an environmentalist. If Michael’s company had an entire team of Michaels, it could rule the paper-utilizing world. So what does Michael’s company do? It promotes him, of course. Now he can manage other salespeople and turn them into Michaels too!
Six months later . . . Michael’s company is well on its way to ruling the world, right?
Wrong.
Unfortunately, Michael seems lost in his new management role. The company no longer has Michael as a top-performing salesperson. And the results of all this are clear in the bottom line; thus, promoting to failure!
This fictional scenario (taken from NBC’s The Office) illustrates a very real danger in promoting your top performers, which affects real life businesses every day.
Just because an employee excels at his or her current position, does not mean that he or she will excel when promoted to a higher position.
According to Dr. Robert Wiley, an experienced and very successful organization performance consultant, a skills gap (between the skills needed for a position and the skills an employee possesses) of 40 percent or more virtually guarantees a promoted employee will fail at his or her new position. While it may be natural to think, “Well surely if this person has been so successful already, there will not be anywhere near such a gap,” a closer look at two examples reveals a different truth.
Sales Rep vs. Sales Manager
Let’s start with a Michael character, a salesman. What makes a great Sales Rep? He or she has drive, is excellent at influencing others, and recovers from setbacks like they are nothing. All their efforts go towards making the sale. They generally don’t have to worry about dealing with other salespeople or things like customer complaints. Their job is to SELL, SELL, SELL.
In addition to technical skills and experience, there are known personality traits that have been statistically proven to drive success in sales roles. At ClearFit, we put these traits together into something called a Success Profile.
The following graphic shows the Success Profile of a top-performing Sales Rep — think of it as showing you the “personality blueprint” for a successful person in this role:
Now think about what makes a great Sales Manager. While a Sales Manager does need drive — any effective manager does — along with other sales-like qualities (including the ability to take leadership and a good risk tolerance), he or she still needs more.
Let’s compare the image above with the one below, which is the ClearFit Success Profile for a top-performing Sales Manager.
A sales manager cannot be concerned with just themselves; they have a whole team looking to them for guidance. There is also a whole team’s worth of work to complete, meaning that the sales manager cannot do it all themselves. Sales managers have to know how to be self-regulating and delegate — tough skills to master especially when they fly in the face of the popular, and too often true, maxim: “If you want it done correctly, do it yourself.”
Additionally, to keep track of and control their team and its tasks, a sales manager must be extremely organized — a surprisingly rare skill.
Finally, a sales manager must accept that they will have to be the responsible bad guy. They will have to reprimand team members, deal with the customer complaints they used to hand over to their boss, step in to resolve conflict, and — eventually — fire someone.
When someone is a salesperson, they are a salesperson. When someone is a sales manager, they are a leader, a teacher, a mediator, the heavy, and the boss.
The following combined graphic shows the Success Profile for a Sales Rep overlaid with that of a Sales Manager.
What does this show us? If you’re thinking about making your Sales Rep a Sales Manager, it’s not enough to look at skills or years of experience. The biggest risk is that they might not have the right personality for the job.
As you can see, these two roles require strengths in similar areas. However, the pool of people who have ALL the personality traits needed to be successful as BOTH a Sales Rep and a Sales Manager (those who would meet all the purple points) is clearly much smaller than the pool of people who can succeed a Sales Rep alone.
A person may have what it takes to succeed as a front-line rep and be missing critical traits that drive success in the management role.
A promotion in this case could be disastrous, as you would not only gain an ineffective Sales Manager but would lose a top performing Sales Rep. Worse yet, there is no way to measure this by looking at technical skill or years of experience.
IT Engineer vs. IT Manager
Consider a different type of position, an IT engineer. Great engineers excel at hands on endeavors and in-the-thick-of-it troubleshooting. Often these engineers are not required to have a lot of interpersonal contact, and they generally seem to prefer it that way. If an engineer needs something — a computer part, innovative new tool, or expensive cable — they just have to ask for it from their boss; they don’t have to worry about where the money is coming from to purchase the item. An IT engineer’s job is to create and implement technical solutions.
An IT manager, however, is not in the trenches anymore, which leads to a decided lack of hands-on opportunities (a feature of the job many engineers truly enjoy). Like the sales manager, an IT manager has to learn to delegate tasks they would have previously undertaken themselves. And while an engineer does not have to worry about interacting with many people, a manager’s job requires them to not only lead and interact with those working under them, but to interact with those working above them as well. Interpersonal skills are crucial to the success of any manager, and an IT manager is no exception. The manager also has to deal with the reality of multiple engineers requesting a seemingly infinite amount of items within a finite budget — a very different reality than they were used to.
Just as with the Sales Rep vs. Sales Manager scenario, those people who have the necessary traits to succeed in one role may not have all the traits needed to succeed in the other.
Once again, the question is not only one of technical skill but also of personality fit.
To Promote or Not to Promote: That Is the Question
It’s up to the boss/hiring manager/etc. to take the correct steps to offer well-founded promotions. Society views promotions as completely positive occurrences; that bias combined with an increase in salary and power makes a promotion hard for any employee to turn down, whether suited for the new position or not.
There are also employees who may believe they are suited for a more senior role, but since they did not have an accurate view of what the position requires, they’ll be quite surprised about and unsuited for the new job. One cannot necessarily rely on unsuitable employees to recognize and/or admit their unsuitability.
Now is this to say that a department’s current top performer is not leadership material? Absolutely not. But before promoting anyone, it is a good idea to compare the skills and personality that employee has with the skills and personality needed for the next step up.
Maybe the top performer just needs a little bit of training and mentoring to be ready for a promotion. Maybe the top performer needs to just stay in the same place, be given a raise, and the senior position needs to go to someone else who has the appropriate fit.
Many options exists that can spare everyone the consequences of an ill-suited promotion, but before any of these options can be explored, everyone needs to recognize that a promotion isn’t always the best way to recognize a top performing employee.
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