When it comes time to fill an open position, promoting from within is an often-overlooked strategy that is beneficial for your employees and the company. From your employees’ standpoint, they know that your company promotes from within and therefore will work harder to climb the ladder. As a company, you are filling your most prominent positions with team members you know can do the job and taking the bigger risk of hiring unknown employees for lower–level positions. How do you identify which team member to promote? Let’s take a look at 5 strategies for determining who your next leader is.
Make Your Employees Take Risks
The best way to see whether employees are capable of a more challenging role is to give new them new and difficult tasks. Assess how well they handle the challenge. What kind of effort is put into learning the appropriate way to complete the task and most importantly how do they bounce back if they fail the first time? A true leader will find a way to correctly accomplish a task no matter how much time and effort it takes.
Incorporate Leadership Workshops
Hold leadership workshops or register your top employees, for leadership training in or nearby your community. Make note of those employees that really seem to be in their element and thrive during these trainings. These are your leaders.
Who is Asking for More Responsibility?
Take notice of employees who are constantly willing to or even asking for more responsibility. It may even be that they are helping other coworkers complete tasks after they have finished theirs. A leader must be willing and able to take on more responsibility.
Employee Skills Should Match Skills Needed for the Position
As great as an employee may be, their skillset must match to some degree what is needed for the position. If it doesn’t then you are setting the employee up for failure. While some training needed is practical, it can’t be completely out of the realm of what the employee can do. Realistically, only focus on employees who have the skillset needed for the soon-to-be promotion.
Who Capitalizes on Opportunities for Growth?
Always offer developmental opportunities for your team members. Assess which employees take full advantage of these opportunities. It is those employees that have the greatest potential to become great leaders.
The First Step is Making Great Hires!
You should always be assessing your employees’ productivity, strengths, and weaknesses even before a position comes open. This way when it is time to promote, you have it narrowed down to your top two or three team members.
The first step is making great hires from the very beginning. As the leading staffing agency in Florida, Salem Solutions has years of experience finding just the right candidate at just the right time to meet your staffing needs. Contact us today to find your next great team member!
