This week horizontal progression versus vertical progression!
I want to talk about progression. You’ll have people in your company, the bright stars out there who are very ambitious and want to grow and want to develop and want to be able to earn more one day. The challenge with some of those people is that they are all preconditioned to think that the only type of progression is a vertical progression where you become a line manager. That is not obviously the case. There are other ways of being able to progress, and that is horizontal progression. Horizontal progression is all about expanding somebody’s area of responsibility, so that’s about giving them more responsibilities or more important responsibilities.
This is why it’s so incredibly important for you. First of all, if you are in a small business, you do not have enough managerial seats on the bus. If 20 people go for one roll, 19 people will obviously be disappointed. Next, up not everybody is actually cut out to be a great manager. Some people might think that they want to be managers because that is the only way of them being able to progress and earn more, but if you take a great salesperson and put them on a sales manager seat, that almost always fails because what makes them a great salesperson is a completely different skill set to what makes somebody a great sales manager a much better progression route for a salesperson might be to give them higher profile customers or to give them a bigger geographical patch.
Be clear on what you’re trying to do with each of those key players. There’s more than one way to skin a cat. There are two ways, and I’ve just given you them. Think about your people, think about your progression, and think about helping them understand what path lays ahead for them in your business.
If you’re looking for more small business tips, then we’d like to see you every week on “Mind Your Own Business,”
Marco Soares is an award-winning business coach in Sussex and is available if you’d like help implementing these tactics.
