Cultivating New Managers

It’s a big deal when you grant managerial responsibilities to one of your key employees. You’re entrusting this person to be a steward of people, processes, and profits. From the employee’s perspective, it can be an important rite of passage.

Unfortunately, executives often tend to promote their best people into managerial roles without consideration for whether they actually possess managerial talent. If you promote someone without evaluating whether he is actually primed to be a good manager, it can be a set up for failure.

The best way to evaluate these skills is to use an objective assessment process. The results will reflect their strengths and weaknesses. But there’s another piece to this: you need to identify the specific managerial competencies that are aligned with the actual job. Your employee may have some great skills, but if her strengths don’t match those that the job requires, her success will be hampered.