Getting promotion-ready: How to help an employee grow into a new role

Knowing when to promote an employee is never easy. Getting it right requires knowing what to look for in the individual and putting support systems into place to ease the transition.

The period after a promotion is often a tumultuous one. Often, insecurities abound, relationship dynamics change, and the individual might feel as though they have a lot to prove.

Elizabeth Wild, environmental law partner at Norton Rose Fulbright, recently sat down with HR Leader to discuss how best to support newly promoted employees.

The leap of faith

When you have doubts about an employee’s capacity to grow into a new role, it can be difficult to parse their shortcomings from a lack of opportunities to prove themselves.

“It’s a kind of chicken or the egg,” said Ms Wild. “It’s never as simple as saying, ‘OK, you’ve demonstrated all the skills necessary for this new position.’”

“There’s a leap of faith you have to take when you promote somebody because they’ll say: ‘Give me the title, and I’ll live up to it.’ Should you trust them, or do you say, ‘live up to it, and then I’ll give you the title?’”

Setting goals

When it is clear that the candidate has room to grow in certain areas, it can pay to set specific, achievable performance metrics, said Ms Wild. “Sometimes, you can see what the candidate must improve upon. In those cases, when you can see they have everything but X, then you can put a plan into place.”

Setting effective metrics requires flexibility and creativity on the part of the employer, said Ms Wild. It is crucial that, in these cases, the performance indicators are tangible and capable of precisely gauging improvements in performance.

“The easiest for us to teach is technical expertise. If you can just say, ‘go and read this textbook, go and read these cases,’ – that’s the easiest one,” said Ms Wild, “If it’s something less teachable, something like commerciality, or even soft skills – those concerning business culture or office politics – then setting goals can become a challenge.”

Checking in

In the workplace, impostor syndrome is the sense that you do not belong in your role - that it should belong to someone with more experience or someone more capable. An estimated 70 per cent of people experience these feelings at some point in their lives, and it can be particularly pronounced among recently promoted employees. According to Forbes, support from an employer can make all the difference.

“I think we all feel like impostors from time to time,” said Ms Wild. “What’s important is finding a way to back yourself. Impostor syndrome is a very real thing, and so are its consequences. It can stress out not only the individual who may be experiencing it but [also] those around them. It can make for a terrible culture.”

The sense of insecurity often felt by newly promoted individuals can be compounded by a sense of isolation: “It’s difficult for someone to suddenly be promoted above their peers. Suddenly, they don’t fit in with their peer group anymore. They also don’t fit in with their bosses because their bosses still see them as a junior. It can be very isolating.”

Indeed, employee loneliness is more than a psychological risk. According to Cigna, employee loneliness costs US businesses more than US$154 billion per year in lost productivity and can have tangible consequences for those around the affected individual.

When a newly promoted individual finds themselves between two worlds, it’s up to the bosses to help out, said Ms Wild. “It’s up to the bosses. It’s human nature for members of a peer group to see the promoted individual differently. While you need to look out for resentment – and transparency is instrumental in addressing peer resentment – it’s really up to the bosses to take the individual under their wing a bit.”

Make use of HR

Often, there’s a stigma associated with referring a situation in the workplace to HR, said Ms Wild. By raising something to the level of HR intervention, an issue might appear more serious.

According to Ms Wild, business leaders shouldn’t be shy to make better use of their HR functions. “It shouldn’t be reserved for minimal compliance situations,” she said, “there’s a role to be played by HR in strategy. [HR professionals] have the tools to spot issues before they arise. It shouldn’t be a tool of last resort.”

“HR can help to bridge the divide between the cold reality of business – say, I want to promote the individual, but there [are] simply no resources available – with the really important human concerns.”

“Promotion is a leap of faith,” said Ms Wild, “nobody has a fully fledged practice when you make them partner. What you need is the confidence in their ability, based on their performance and behaviour, that they have the competence and the emotional resilience that the new position will always require.”