A very good friend of mine spoke to me the other day overjoyed that they had recently passed their promotion board and been accepted as a now executive for the firm that they have worked for the past 10 years.
This may all sound like a great news story but in the back of my mind I was sceptical about the news as only a month or two ago I had been speaking to them about the options of moving on as they were really not happy where they were and they felt undervalued by the company.
When I had spoken to them previously, they were in the mindset of leaving and taking their savings as a parachute to support themselves for a year or more while they reassessed their work requirements and balance their lives. They are in the lucky or unluck position of being able to work from home the majority of their time but that can also mean there are no clear breaks between work and home, but that's a separate blog all together. They are also a very technical guy who is in my humble opinion amazing at their job. So why was he so unhappy?
The company had kept him locked in a very technical role which he thrived in but he was being bypassed for promotion because the people who he was reporting to didn't really understand what he was doing and as such they couldn't fairly evaluate him. He is also one of those people who just loves to fix a problem, so he was doing a fair bit of cross departmental work that wasn't really being fully reported because he wasn't technically supposed to be there and the recognition he was getting wasn't being fed up the right chain for him to be awarded that recognition, it's all very complicated and they are a big organization with many departments. His customers love him and he is often asked for personally by the clients so you kind of get the picture as to how he gets by.
He looked to apply for the promotion board previously but for one reason or another wasn't placed in the pool for consideration, he then applied the next year and was placed in the pool but he was then removed from it because the panel had said they had a lot of good talent last year that didn't make the cut, so they wanted to pick from them. So my friend took this up with his HR department who agreed with him that he should have just as much a right to be considered as the people from last year and that he should be placed back in the pool, my friend had also made it clear to the HR team that this was not how he believed he should be treated and that perhaps the organization was not the right place for him moving forward if that was their attitude. Anyway, as the story goes he was placed in the pool, considered and awarded the promotion.
Now my moral conjecture here is that the organization hadn't noted him as promotion material and they had in fact overlooked him for the talent pool. He had to fight to get into that pool and then to stay in that pool but at the end of the day they gave him the promotion. Did they promote him to recognize him or retain him? Was this a promotion for merit or fear and should we have to tell our employers that we are going to consider alternative organizations to get up the ladder? I wonder that if it were you and the situation was with your employer, would you be still looking for a new role or would you feel that this was fair recognition?
Recognizing the value your employees deliver to your business should be the same as ensuring the machinery runs. You have a maintenance schedule for your equipment to ensure it runs at optimum do you have the same for your staff? Human resources deliver Human capital and that is the value in your organization. So often employees get forgotten and taken for granted, I fully support that they let the company know they were not feeling valued by being passe over for promotion and I hope they receive the recognition they deserve, and this has brought a deficiency in their organization to light to be fixed.
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