For a company, internal promotion (vertical mobility) offers some rather interesting advantages. In addition to building team loyalty, it saves recruiters time. What’s more, it increases the chances of successful recruitment, thanks in particular to the quality of internal candidates. Provided that the internal promotion process has been meticulous!
Pascaline de Ruyver, an expert in internal mobility support, tells us more about why and how to support a promoted employee.
Pascaline de Ruyver runs the QuinteSens management coaching and training firm .
An expert in the individual coaching of managers and executives, she accompanies them throughout their professional lives, helping them to develop their leadership, relational and managerial effectiveness.
To work, internal promotion must be supported!
The advantages of internal promotion
Internal promotion (or vertical internal mobility) is a preferred corporate practice.
Encouraged by HR, it has a triple advantage:
- Highly appreciated by the employee who benefits from it, it is a strong act of valorization on the part of the manager. What’s more, it helps retain the most talented employees.
- Reassuring for the manager, it guarantees that the newcomer has the right attitude and has already worked within the company, thus avoiding casting errors.
- Finally, in the short term, it is considered to be more economical than external recruitment, as it involves fewer costs (advertising, recruitment agency services, integration period, training, etc.), and is also faster!
And therein lies the rub!
Careful employee integration, the key to success
We might think that the promoted employee doesn’t need an integration or training period… This is THE trap to avoid! Especially if this is the first time the employee has reached a position with managerial responsibilities.
Without an integration period, the good news quickly becomes an ordeal to overcome. It can become a real obstacle course for the employee, which in some cases ends in failure!
Everyone loses out: the employee, who loses his or her confidence, or even his or her job, and the company, which loses a high-performance employee and has to start recruiting all over again…
The needs of the promoted employee
Why, in the case of internal promotion, should the employee be the focus of all attention? He knows the company, he’s efficient and motivated… That should be enough, shouldn’t it?
The greatest difficulty for employees taking on managerial responsibilities lies in the need to :
- Find the right attitude towards their new colleagues (sometimes former colleagues),
- Integrate the role of manager into their mission, without mastering (or sometimes even knowing) the fundamental managerial tools, methods and rituals,
- And finally, to make their mark, to break away from their models, to be true without revolutionizing everything from the very first weeks.
To achieve this, employees need to be supported by HR teams and their managers. A genuine internal mobility strategy needs to be put in place.
The manager: a central role in supporting the employee after an internal promotion…
You have to learn how to be a manager!
Some would say that for an employee who has never held the position of manager before, getting to grips with it is a matter of a few common-sense rules or practical tips, such as :
- Start with an observation phase,
- Meet individually with all team members to discover their individuality,
- Express your own expectations transparently.
However, the new manager needs to be supported in his or her professional development, and must be the subject of real follow-up!
The role of the direct manager in training the promoted employee
The key to successful internal promotion lies not only with the employee and his or her ability to comply with these few rules, but also with the direct manager and his or her involvement in the entire process:
- Validate, first and foremost, the employee’s motivation to take on a managerial role (being a manager is not an end in itself; there are other ways of rewarding an employee, such as offering horizontal mobility!)
- Evaluate skills upstream and measure the gap with job requirements.
- Organize training to make up for technical and, above all, managerial shortcomings.
- Support him as he takes on his new role and changes his posture.
Everyone has a role to play in ensuring that internal mobility is beneficial to the company.
One possible solution is to offer the employee concerned managerial training, i.e. support over a period of several weeks, designed to anchor managerial practices through a balance of theory, practice and debriefing of the actions implemented….
Contrary to what you might think, to be a vector of performance for the company, internal promotion requires the implementation of a complete integration process. This means defining a real strategy. You can then encourage your employees to take the plunge by drawing inspiration from these 8 concrete examples of how to encourage internal mobility.
