Situation: The CEO is moving a key employee from head of engineering to a more customer development focus. To support this, she will have to bring in or promote another employee to fill the position of leader/supervisor/manager of the engineering group. The CEO seeks advice on the best way to approach finding a replacement for this key job. How do you replace a key position?
Advice from the CEOs:
• First, it is necessary to develop a timeline for finding and transitioning the replacement. Realistically, count on 6 months to find a replacement and transition the responsibilities to a new person.
• Keep in mind that anybody you find or promote will be different from the individual who currently occupies the position, and will not handle their new responsibilities the same way as the current individual. Their motivation and their approach to their new responsibilities will be different, at least at the outset, and they will not handle their responsibilities the same way that the current individual does.
• Seek an individual, either currently within the company or an outside hire with strengths that, over time, will add significant value to the organization. Prepare for this by brainstorming and developing a profile of the ideal candidate.
• If you have qualified candidates, the ideal person will come from within the organization. This has the added advantage of demonstrating to other employees that they, also, may become candidates for future positions to grow both their skills and income.
Tag Archives: Promote
How Do You Train Others to Do Your Old Job? Four Points
Situation: A CEO has a key employee who has just been promoted to an important managerial position within the company. The task for this individual is to train others to do what he has done in the past. However. this individual feels uncomfortable training others to do what he was able to do. He feels like he is obsolescing himself. How do you coach this individual to let go of past responsibilities? How do you train others to do your old job?
Advice from the CEOs:
- This individual was promoted because he excelled in his former job. His mastery of these skills, plus his past management background, prompted the CEO to offer him a managerial position. It is critical to understand that his job and responsibilities are no longer what they used to be.
- As a manager, an individual is no longer expected to be a “doer”. The primary responsibility is now to select, manage, train, and promote others whose primary responsibility is “doing.”
- As this individual is coached, encourage him to step back and look at the big picture of his new role.
- The CEO does not expect perfection from the start. He understands from his own experience that learning management takes time.
- However, he also knows that to become a new manager requires giving up many of the hands-on activities that one used to perform. The job is no longer to do these yourself, but to coach others to be able to perform these tasks to the standards of the firm.
- Initially, this takes more time than “doing it yourself.” However, this individual now has talented people reporting to him and they will learn quickly. In a short while, it will take less time to delegate than to do it himself.
- From a big picture standpoint, a manager justifies the higher salary and greater prospects that come with a new position by training his or her team to do what used to be “their job” at a lower salary than the manager’s current salary.
- In short, in the role of manager, the better one is at developing others who can take on the skills that they used to demonstrate, the more successful that individual will be as a manager, and the more value they will bring to the Company.
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How Do You Boost Awareness of Your Products and Services? Seven Suggestions
Situation: A CEO wants to increase awareness of company products and services. They have a strong customer list and a long history of successful projects. How to they increase awareness among potential customer decision-makers? How do you boost awareness of your products and services?
Advice from the CEOs:
- There are three stages to a good awareness strategy:
- Visibility
- Credibility
- Profitability
- The company already has great products and services. Hire a quality PR Firm and have them highlight this for company trade shows, blogs, YouTube, etc.
- The objective is not broad awareness but getting to specific decision-makers – what will get to them?
- Generate broad awareness of company capabilities through entertaining videos to excite the team members of prospect companies who report to the decision makers.
- This is a complex strategic sell. If recommenders think that the company’s stuff is cool they will pass the word – create a campaign to encourage this.
- The priority is to close more business. Why not brand or co-brand and promote the company’s products? This may ease reaching the target decision makers.
- The PR advice is good – but how will this play to the crowd that’s writing the check?
- What makes current customers comfortable working with the company? Is it repeatability? Credibility? Creativity? Referenceability? Decide which it is and highlight it.
- Everything that the company is doing on the “cool” side falls under the marketing strategy. Efforts in PR and sales must support this marketing strategy.
- Consider a campaign on YouTube – How do the parts of “Sally” work? How did we design it? This attracts a smaller audience, but it may be the right audience.
- Within company capabilities, there are two distinctions to clarify – both are important but require different emphasis:
- Innovating the product
- Innovating the process – making it happen
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