Promotion Strategies
Most organisations experience the difficulties associated with trying to predict which staff have managerial and leadership potential.
We have all heard of the cases of good engineers who have made poor engineering managers, good salespeople who, when promoted to sales management, have lacked leadership skills, or effective caseworkers who have lacked supervisory skills when appointed as casework managers.
In the public sector, panel interviews are often used when making promotion decisions. These may be viewed by some staff as something approaching a lottery and one hears comments such as "I missed out because so and so was on the panel" or "I missed out because I was the first/last one they saw" or "I missed out because they asked me the wrong questions".
This can lead to time-consuming promotion appeals which can have unexpected outcomes and cause lengthy delays in confirming appointments.
Use of the assessment centre method can dramatically reduce appeals. In the hundreds of promotions which have used CF&A assessment centres in the public sector over the last three years, there has been just one successful appeal and this was on grounds unrelated to the selection methodology.
To achieve maximum value add, we work with organisations to identify the strategic points in career structures where past performance may not always be predictive of future performance. These transition points often require quite different types of skills, aptitudes and abilities for success at the higher level and we recommend appropriate assessment processes which might be implemented.
Click here to see DoCS Casework Manager and Casework Specialist case study.