Why do we in America seem to promote people who are not equipped to do what their new job requires? Take for example a Carpenter. He gets a job out of High school and works for his employer for, say, 5 years and becomes an excellent craftsman. Then he gets promoted to "Job Foreman" because there is an opening. So far so good. So he works for another 3 years and the business grows and he is then promoted to site coordinator. He still does a good job, but he is then using his possibly undeveloped organizational skills instead of his instictive excellent carpentry skills. A few years later he is promoted to Personell Manager. This is where the problems flower. Here we have a H.S. grad who is a superior carpenter, working with people, which issomething he is not trained to do, and possibly doesn't want to do. While he may be content and do a fine job managing people, the chances are slim.
From his employers perspective, he is being done a favor by "moving up", but in reality he is being set up for frustration and failure (as well as his subordinates) by putting him into a role that he is is not necessarily gifted in. Eventially we have an entire company full of people who are operating out side of their expertise and making decisions that they may have no knowlege of.
I Say we keep the good carpenters as carpenters.
But kudos to any business that wants to try to make their best carpenter a CEO.
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1 comment:
people are promoted to their level of incompetence. it's a fact of life. the challenge is, when it happens to you, are you alert and brave enough to say, "i am getting paid lots more money to make everyone's life miserable by doing a bad job, so i would rather be demoted, please."?
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