The world of IT is becoming increasingly competitive, and employees who want to advance their careers need to have professional business skills along with technical know-how. As a manager, you might be looking to promote internally or just want to groom your employees to someday take a bigger leadership role. It’s okay if you don’t think they’re ready right now, but it’s important to take the right steps to prepare them. Try these three tactics to groom your current IT employees for management positions.
Assign Them to Lead on Projects
One of the best ways to build the experience of your employees is to let them lead major projects from start to finish. If your company starts a new project or wants to change existing systems, meet with your employees and explain that you want them to run it from the ideation process through completion. Instead of making it seem like you just want to increase their workload, explain that this is an opportunity to work with multiple people within the company and understand the management process. If they want to become a manager someday, they should embrace this challenge.
After the project is over, sit with your employee and ask them about the project. Explain feedback on what went well and what needs improvement. You might discover that they need additional leadership training before they’re ready to handle certain situations and manage full time.
Let Them Manage Vendor Relationships
While they’re not full-time employees within the organization, vendors need regular management from internal team members so they’re up to date on company goals, news, and projects. Without this management, company vendors will continue to perform at par, and their performance might even suffer if they’re unaware of certain changes. If you’re not ready to give your employees people to manage, consider assigning a few vendor relationships to them as a test run.
For example, if Asentinel runs your telecom expense management, your employee should conduct annual and quarterly reviews of their performance and set goals for improvement in the future. They should also pass on any information from management that’s relevant to their services. If they treat the vendor with respect and care, then you should be able to trust them to manage people.
Give Them Opportunities to Train Other Employees
If you want your employees to be respected as leaders after you promote them, make sure that the rest of the team understands the value they provide as managers. Encourage your employees to host training seminars where they will become comfortable speaking publicly while they share their information and help their co-workers. Additionally, start making them the point person to troubleshoot problems and issues. This way, when they are promoted, everyone will respect them as the go-to person to solve their problems.
Depending on your time frame, your employee should be in a better place for a promotion within a few months or quarters. They might feel frustrated by the extra work in the short run, but they will appreciate the training you provided when they have to solve management issues.
Tech Talk 