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| Prevent New IT Managers from Eroding Profitability |
By Joe Santana
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 Joe is a Director with Siemens Business Services and Co-Author of "Manage IT - A Step by Step Guide to Help New and Aspiring IT Managers" to make the right career choices and gain the skills necessary for peak performance. A 21-year IT veteran who has extensive experience coaching and training new IT managers and sales representatives, Joe has a 360° view of the IT world as a result of having positions where he literally bought, sold and delivered IT services.
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| New managers make predictable blunders. These blunders have been identified as the top reason behind employee disengagement, which costs American companies an estimated $350 billion per year. Given the strategic value of information technology, mistakes by new IT managers can be extremely painful. Here are five simple ways that Human Resource managers can prevent newly promoted IT managers from eroding profitability. |
| 1. Make sure your candidates are management competent |
The core abilities employed by good managers are very different from the core abilities employed by high-performance IT professionals. Before promoting high-performing IT professionals into IT management roles, make sure they have the basic talents in the area of vertical and horizontal communication, coaching, change management, partnering, and negotiating, to name a few that are vital to success as a manager.
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| 2. Make sure candidates want to “manage” as well as be called a manager |
As a technology professional, the employee is an “individual contributor,” or “team contributor.” Good managers on the other hand, are enablers, star-makers and coaches. Make sure that your candidates want to play this role of supporting a team.
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Junior Team Member
Senior Team Member
Manager |
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| 3. Make sure candidates weigh the pros and cons before deciding |
| Even when candidates have the right talent and desire to be managers, they may be unwilling to pay the price exacted by a specific IT management job. For example, the new job may require a great deal of travel, giving up pet technology projects, relocation or other things perceived as “cons” by the candidate. An individual's needs, perception and situation are what determine whether these are minor or major "cons". |
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It is important to place all potential pros and cons on the table for assessment by qualified candidates before they accept a promotion. This will help to prevent post-promotion "blues" that could turn into resentment and poor performance, even by a talented and otherwise motivated candidate. |
| 4. Provide newly promoted managers with an “orientation” |
In the past, companies thought of orientations as something to do within the first 90 days of hiring a new employee in order to settle them into the company. Today, however, many experts recognize that the value of good orientation practices continue way beyond the first three months of a career.
One of these experts is Dr. Jon Couture, Senior Vice President of HR Siemens Business Services and the developer of the Employee Lifecycle Management© HR Model. According to Dr. Couture’s model an employee’s career with a company is comprised of lifecycles that begin and end with each lateral move or promotion to a new role. When employees enter a new role, according to Couture, they need to be re-oriented into that new role.
Here are just a few of the areas where the reorientation is needed:- Expectations from the new role·
- Expectations about how the newly promoted manager will exit the former role·
- Where and how to gain access to the tools needed to do the new job·
- Where and how to gain access to people needed to do the new job·
- A clear understanding of the incentives and disincentives impacting this new role
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(Proof of the value of this approach can be seen in the fact that, by using this model, Siemens Business Services has successfully maintained high performance and a turnover rate below industry standards, despite the fast pace of promotions and lateral moves.)
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| 5. Provide newly promoted managers with coaching |
Training alone will not turn your talented fledging manager into a pro. In fact, many companies spending millions of dollars have, to their distress, discovered that a short 30 days after completing a training program, the participants had forgotten 87% of what little they actually learned.
Furthermore, they discovered that individual coaching over a period of time dramatically increased the application and retention of newly learned material. So for maximum learning impact, make a commitment to provide your newly promoted managers with at least 10 to 12 weeks of new management skill coaching. |
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