Being a supervisor is a serious undertaking, and it’s one where the overall impact to the team and the organization can be vast. How you go about promoting employees will factor in when assessing whether your impact ends up being positive or negative.
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As a supervisor, it is your job to hire, develop, supervise, coach, lead, evaluate and promote the best. It is your job to manage performance. It is your job to position the organization for short and long-term success. It is your job to provide resources and remove obstacles so employees can do their best work. And it is your job to be as objective as humanly possible when dealing with and promoting your employees. This is not easy, but it is critically important.
It takes real skill to be a supervisor. It takes highly developed emotional intelligence, conflict management, communication, negotiation, leadership and decision-making skills to be an effective supervisor. And it takes courage to be a great one. If you find yourself promoting employees for any of the following reasons, you may very well be lacking in the courage department and seriously struggling—maybe even failing—in the leadership department.
Here are three ridiculous reasons to promote employees.
1. Because they are incompetent.
Promoting and rewarding incompetence is a technique too many supervisors use to get rid of difficult, disruptive or poor-performing—even incompetent—employees after having failed to adequately supervise, develop, lead or hold these people accountable. This happens much too often, and it is detrimental to organizational success.
When you decide it’s easier to reward poor performance than it is to actually address it, you are failing as a leader. When given a choice to resolve conflict and manage performance head on or pass the buck—the problem so to speak—to another supervisor, maybe even in a different department, you are failing as a leader.
Promoting incompetence and rewarding poor performance demonstrates a lack of courage, and it diminishes overall performance and decreases employee morale. When poor-performing or incompetent employees get promoted, high-performing employees become discouraged and may ultimately disengage completely. Instead of getting an easy out from your problem, you actually just end up with a different problem. And, instead of contributing to a culture of excellence, intelligence, creativity and competence, you just create a culture of mediocrity, stagnation and deeper levels of poor and ineffective leadership.
2. Because you like them.
It is important that you develop great working relationships with your superiors, your colleagues and your employees. Surely, you want to develop a high-performing team and celebrate, acknowledge and appreciate individuals that you have a strong affinity for and actually like. It is understandable that you’d want to promote such employees as a way of showing how much you like them and in an effort to show appreciation for the work they deliver for you and the organization. This is not the issue though.
The issue here is when you promote employees simply because you like them without being able to adequately substantiate the value they add or whether they indeed add any real value at all. When people are being promoted for no other reason than your own subjectivity, you are doing a disservice to everyone and most of all to your own perceived leadership.
3. Because of their ethnicity, race or gender.
No employee should be promoted only because of skin color or gender. Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) are hugely important facets of organizational culture and critical to organizational success, sustainability and competitiveness. But when employees are promoted based only on their ethnicity, race or gender without being able to substantiate their value, competence or qualifications, the end result will likely cause harm to achieving DEI strategic priorities and serve to damage the reputation of employees.
Be a strong advocate for DEI, but don’t harm it by promoting unqualified minorities in an attempt to create a false sense of diversity and inclusion where it doesn’t exist. Also don’t promote unqualified individuals who aren’t minorities just to keep the status quo either. Instead of buttressing DEI initiatives and programs, this type of behavior will surely damage them.
Ensure that all employees have equal opportunity to develop and compete for promotions. Provide all employees access to power and influence and the kind of high-profile projects that let them shine. Assign mentoring opportunities equitably. But don’t compromise performance or organizational culture to do it. Don’t create an environment where the promoted employees have to bear the wrath of colleagues because they perceive you made the decision simply based on race, ethnicity or gender.
The wrap up:
The reasons can—and do—get even worse. If we go to the dark corners of the human mind and behavior, there are certainly many more horrible reasons to promote employees. Other clearly inappropriate reasons include things like attempting to get sexual favors, in response to a bribe, because of nepotism, etc. You get the point. Promoting employees for the wrong reasons is just plain wrong.
Promote your best employees. Promote employees who have demonstrated their ability to take on more responsibility. Promote those who have the skills, experience, qualifications and potential for success. Promote employees who deserve it based on objectivity metrics and merit. But don’t use a promotion to get rid of incompetent, poor performers because you don’t have the courage to manage their performance or deal with the conflict. Don’t promote people you like when the decision can’t be substantiated based on clear objectivity and merit. Finally, don’t use promotions to create a false sense or representation of diversity or to maintain the status quo.
