I have long been amused and frustrated with the way many organizations develop supervisors at any level.
Someone works for the organization, does a good job, demonstrates technical competence, and perhaps shows some ambition or interest in advancement. Eventually, a supervisory position becomes available, the person is promoted, and then somebody says, “Now that you’re a supervisor, we need to send you to supervisor training.” I have always thought there was something backwards about that sequence. Why didn’t we teach the person how to supervise before we made that person a supervisor?
It seems to me that we have confused promotion with preparation. A promotion gives someone a new level of responsibility, but it does not automatically give that person the knowledge, skills, judgment, or perspective necessary to handle that responsibility. When we promote someone and then begin teaching them what the new job requires, we have essentially made the person learn the job while doing the job. That might be unavoidable in some circumstances, but it shouldn’t be the organizational strategy.
There is actually research that raises this very issue. Maria S. Plakhotnik published a paper in 2017 titled First-time managers: increasing chances of their success before the promotion. Her argument is remarkably consistent with what I have observed throughout my career. Organizations tend to concentrate their attention on helping people after they become managers, while giving comparatively little attention to the period before the promotion. Plakhotnik describes that earlier period as a preparation period and argues that organizations should deliberately support first-time managers before they take on the job.
Well, that’s exactly what I’m talking about.
An Example: If My Sergeants’ Academy Were Really a Sergeants’ Academy
Let’s take a police organization as an example. I have conducted The Sergeants’ Academy for more than 20 years. If it were really a Sergeants’ Academy, there would not be a single sergeant in the room. The room would be filled with police officers who are thinking about becoming sergeants and who want to understand what the job actually involves before they are asked to perform it.
Those officers could learn about planning, organizing, leading, and controlling. They could learn how the job changes when they become responsible not simply for their own work but for the work of other people. They could learn how to establish expectations, communicate, delegate, deal with conflict, solve problems, make decisions, and hold people accountable. They could learn what happens when the people they supervise are also their friends, and what happens when someone who used to be their peer becomes their subordinate.
More importantly, they would have an opportunity to discover whether they actually want the job. That seems like useful information to me. I would much rather have someone decide that supervising other people isn’t what they want to do while they are still a police officer than discover it six months after you have promoted them to sergeant. The organization hasn’t lost anything by helping that person make an informed decision. In fact, it may have avoided making a very expensive mistake.
The Same Thing Applies at Every Level
The same principle applies throughout an organization. If any Executive Academy were really an Executive Academy, why would the room be filled with executives? Wouldn’t it make more sense for the room to contain supervisors and managers who may someday become executives? They could learn what executive responsibility looks like before they are given executive responsibility, just as police officers could learn what supervisory responsibility looks like before becoming sergeants.
The same idea can be applied at every level. Teach the line employee what supervision is before promoting that employee to supervisor. Teach the supervisor what management is before promoting the supervisor to manager. Teach the manager what organizational leadership involves before promoting the manager to executive. Don’t wait for the promotion to begin the education.
I don’t mean that someone should have to complete a course before being allowed to advance, nor do I mean that every person who participates in developmental training should eventually receive a promotion. Quite the opposite. Development should give people enough information about the next level of responsibility that they can make a more informed decision about whether they actually want to pursue it.
Being Good at the Current Job Doesn’t Prepare You for the Next Job
One of the most obvious problems in organizational life is that being good at one job doesn’t necessarily prepare someone for the next job. A person can be an outstanding police officer and have no idea how to supervise six police officers. A person can be an excellent technician and have no idea how to lead a technical team. A person can be a terrific salesperson and have no idea how to manage a sales department. A person can be a very good supervisor and have no idea how to manage an organization.
The jobs are different, the responsibilities are different, the relationships are different, and the decisions are different. Yet organizations routinely treat success at one level as though it automatically qualifies someone for success at the next. It doesn’t. A promotion changes the job; it doesn’t automatically change the person.
There is another problem that I think organizations sometimes overlook. The skills that make people promotable are sometimes the very antithesis of what it will take to be a Team Guidant, a Systems Guidant, or a CEO – a Strategic Guidant.
The person who gets things done personally may be praised for being a terrific employee, but the person responsible for leading a team has to get things done through other people. The person who knows every technical detail may be highly valued as a technician, but a leader needs to understand when to stop doing the work personally and start creating the conditions in which other people can do it well. The person who has succeeded by controlling every detail may find that the next level requires trust, delegation, perspective, and the ability to see the system rather than simply the task immediately in front of them.
In other words, the behaviors that made someone successful at one level may have to change substantially at the next level. Sometimes they have to be unlearned. That is one more reason why I don’t think we should simply promote people and hope they figure it out.
DDI’s research on frontline leadership illustrates the problem. In its research involving first-level leaders, only 10 percent said they felt prepared for the transition into leadership, while 90 percent said they were unprepared. DDI also found that 84 percent described the transition as stressful.
When nine out of ten people entering their first leadership role don’t feel prepared, I think it is worth asking whether the problem is really with the people who have been promoted. Perhaps the problem is that we haven’t prepared them. We have a tendency to look at the newly promoted supervisor and ask, “What’s wrong with this person?” Maybe the better question is, “What did we do to prepare this person for the job?”
The People Being Supervised Didn’t Apply for the Learning Curve
The issue becomes even more important when we consider who else is affected. When an organization promotes someone who isn’t prepared to supervise, the newly promoted supervisor isn’t the only person who experiences the consequences. The employees being supervised experience them as well, and they didn’t apply for the learning curve.
They didn’t agree to spend six months figuring out whether their new supervisor knows what he or she is doing. They simply showed up for work. If their supervisor doesn’t know how to establish expectations, organize work, communicate effectively, deal with conflict, provide feedback, or hold people accountable, the employees experience the consequences of that lack of preparation. So does the organization.
Work can become less efficient. Productivity can suffer. Quality can suffer. Problems can linger. Employees can become frustrated. The new supervisor can become frustrated. Eventually, somebody may conclude that the person wasn’t ready to be a supervisor in the first place.
CIPD makes a similar point in its guidance for people managers. It notes that people-management skills are not always considered when someone is promoted into management and that managers can be left to learn on the job. Its guidance emphasizes the need for development, training, coaching, and support rather than assuming that the necessary capabilities will somehow appear when someone receives a management title.
That seems like common sense to me. If we know that a person’s responsibilities are about to change, why wouldn’t we help that person understand those responsibilities before the change occurs – and do everything we can to help them hit the path running.
The First-Line Supervisor Matters
The first-line supervisor is where organizational intentions become daily behavior. People at the top of an organization can establish policies, strategic plans, values, and objectives, but somebody has to turn those things into Tuesday morning. That somebody is often the first-line supervisor.
The supervisor determines what gets attention, communicates priorities, assigns work, notices problems, responds to problems, gives feedback, establishes expectations, and determines through thousands of ordinary interactions what the organization actually feels like to the people doing the work.
Gallup has reported that managers account for about 70 percent of the variance in team engagement. I don’t suggest that one statistic proves everything about management, but it does reinforce something I have seen repeatedly: the person directly supervising a team has a substantial influence on the experience of the people on that team.
If that is true, then preparing the first-line supervisor shouldn’t be treated as an afterthought. The organization has a responsibility to prepare the person before handing that person responsibility for other people.
Why Don’t We Do It?
There are probably several reasons. Sometimes we’re lazy. Sometimes we’re shortsighted. Sometimes we’re unimaginative. Sometimes we’re afraid to invest in somebody who might leave. Sometimes we’re so focused on filling today’s vacancy that we don’t think about preparing somebody for tomorrow’s opportunity. And sometimes we’re simply doing what we’ve always done.
“We’ve always sent new supervisors to supervisor training after they’re promoted.”
Okay. But that’s not really an explanation. It’s a habit. And habits aren’t necessarily good simply because they are familiar.
There is another problem that I think deserves consideration. We often confuse selection with development. We select somebody because we believe that person has the potential to succeed at the next level, and then we assume that the person is ready for the next level. Potential isn’t preparation. Interest isn’t preparation. Technical competence isn’t preparation. And a promotion certainly isn’t preparation.
What If We Prepared People Before We Needed Them?
Imagine doing this differently. Imagine that every employee had the opportunity to learn what the next level of responsibility actually involved. That wouldn’t be a promise of promotion or a guarantee of advancement. It would simply be an opportunity to learn. Read my article: “A Continuity Imperative: Succession Planning.“
A line employee could learn about supervision. A supervisor could learn about leadership and management. A manager could learn about organizational leadership and systems coordination. While learning, each person could ask the question that organizations don’t ask nearly often enough: “Do I really want to do this?”
That’s an important question because advancement isn’t necessarily desirable for everyone. Some people are perfectly happy doing the work they do. Some people don’t want responsibility for other people’s work. Some people don’t want to spend their days dealing with personnel issues, organizational politics, budgets, performance problems, or competing priorities. That’s okay.
The purpose of development isn’t to force everyone upward. It is to help people understand what lies ahead so they can make purposeful decisions about their own futures.
At the same time, an organization gets an opportunity to develop people before it desperately needs them. When a supervisory position opens, the organization doesn’t necessarily have to start from zero. There may already be people inside the organization who understand what supervision involves, have begun developing the necessary skills, and have decided that they actually want the responsibility.
That strikes me as a much more sensible approach to succession and organizational development.
This Is Where The Guidant Path Comes In
This is one of the ideas behind my book, The Guidant Path: Organizational Series – The Master Collection.
The concept is pretty simple. People should have an opportunity to understand the path ahead of them before they arrive at the next destination. I don’t mean that everybody needs to be placed on some predetermined career ladder. I mean that people should be able to see what may be ahead, understand what those roles require, and begin preparing themselves for the responsibilities that may come with them.
A line employee can learn about supervision before becoming a supervisor. A supervisor can learn about management before becoming a manager. A manager can learn about organizational leadership before becoming an executive. That’s what I mean by a path. You can see where you are, you can see what might be ahead, and you can decide what you want to do about it.
That is also why I think the idea fits with my larger notion of the Purposeful Adult. A purposeful adult doesn’t simply wait for something to happen and then react to it. A purposeful adult considers what might be ahead, learns what needs to be learned, and makes choices about what comes next.
Too Many Organizations Have Been Doing Leadership Development Backwards
For a long time, the organizational model has looked something like this: promotion, training, and then learning the job. I think it would make much more sense to reverse the first two steps: interest, learning, preparation, opportunity, promotion, and then application.
That doesn’t mean people stop learning after they are promoted. They should continue learning throughout their careers. But their first exposure to the responsibilities of a new position shouldn’t occur after they have been handed the keys.
If my Sergeants’ Academy were really a Sergeants’ Academy, there wouldn’t be a sergeant in the room. There would be officers preparing to become sergeants. If my Executive Academy were really an Executive Academy, there wouldn’t be an executive in the room. There would be supervisors and managers preparing to become executives.
Maybe that’s a little counterintuitive. Maybe it’s also a little more sensible.
We shouldn’t have to wait until someone gets the job to teach them what the job is. If we know that someone may eventually be asked to supervise other people, why not give that person an opportunity to learn what supervision is before the promotion? The person might decide that supervision isn’t for them. The organization might discover someone who is genuinely interested and capable of preparing for it. And the people who eventually work for that person might benefit from having a supervisor who didn’t begin learning the job on their first day.
It seems to me that preparing people before promotion is not particularly radical. It is simply more purposeful.
Maybe we’re still being lazy and shortsighted because we’ve always done it the other way.
Maybe it’s time to stop.
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Additional Reading
Plakhotnik, Maria S. “First-time managers: increasing chances of their success before the promotion.” Industrial and Commercial Training, Vol. 49, Issue 3, 2017. This is particularly relevant because it directly examines the preparation period before promotion and argues that organizations should support first-time managers during that period.
Development Dimensions International (DDI). The State of Frontline Leadership in 2020. DDI’s research examines the transition into first-level leadership and reports that most first-level leaders did not feel prepared for that transition.
Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD). Support for People Managers. CIPD discusses the importance of people-management capability and the need for organizations to develop managers rather than assuming that those capabilities appear with the management title.
Gallup. How to Engage Frontline Managers. Gallup examines the relationship between managers, employee engagement, and team outcomes, including its finding that managers account for approximately 70 percent of the variance in team engagement.
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Author’s Note: The content provided in this article is designed exclusively for educational and informational purposes, reflecting opinions shaped by decades of leadership training and organizational consulting experience. It should never be interpreted as formal professional advice. By reading or engaging with this material, you acknowledge that no professional-client relationship is established and that these insights do not substitute for tailored guidance from a qualified professional familiar with your specific circumstances. Consequently, readers are strongly advised to seek independent counsel from licensed legal, financial, medical, or other appropriate advisors before implementing any strategies or making decisions based on these perspectives. Ultimately, you assume full personal responsibility for any actions you choose to take or omit as a result of reading this material, releasing the author and publisher from any liability for outcomes arising from your reliance on the text.
