Selecting the Best Manager

When filling a management position, should you promote from within or hire an outsider?

Our expert weighs the pros and cons.

Hiring management-level employees can often be a daunting task. Of course, the major challenge is to select the individual who'll best fit into both the position and your business's culture. Before considering any candidates, however, your first decision is to determine whether you should promote internally or hire externally.

This article presents the pros and cons of each choice.

There are five good reasons why you might want to consider hiring an internal candidate.

First, it sets a precedent and second, it's good for morale. Employees are often very pleased when they see that "one of their own" has been promoted to a management-level position. And when morale goes up, productivity most often follows, especially when the employees like or respect the newly promoted individual.
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Meeting Success Tip

You can make use of confrontation. Turn it around. Approach it without apologies, avoid emotional involvement and use facts. Then turn it into a joint problem solving exercise.

More on meeting success.

Don't allow phones in a meeting room

[From Robyn Pearce]

A very large international IT company asked for a course on 'How to run effective meetings'. It was the weirdest session I've ever run; a brilliant example of how not to run meetings. The trouble was, the CEO had a different work ethic to the rest of the company.

She'd been sent to Australia from the States to do the job, and had no family in the country. Her work was her life and she expected her managers to behave in the same way.

The session was a bun fight! People came and went like yoyos, phones rang constantly, and although everyone had chosen to come, the activities of a number of the group were so (unintentionally) disruptive that it minimised the learning
of the rest.

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Look out Below

On April 14, 1912, a luxury ocean liner on its maiden voyage struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic and sank within hours, sending some 1,500 people to cold, watery graves.

The Titanic tragedy has been memorialised and analysed in movies, books and historical exhibits.

As anyone who saw James Cameron's 1997 blockbuster movie about this event can attest, the story is full of great human drama. From a leadership perspective, however, what really interests me is the iceberg.

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Leadership success tip

We must always be alert to the problems team members may cause, and their weaknesses. But the strength of the team and its leader will be based on the ability to also see the best value in each other. We must not waste that value. And as individuals, we will always rise to the best value people see in us.

For free articles on Leadership, visit the Pivotal Leadership pages

Pivotal Leadership Point

On the eve of his first inauguration, George Washington is reported to have said "Integrity and firmness are all I can promise."

Before you can have integrity, you must have firm values. It is important that you establish a basis of conduct from which to operate. Without a firm knowledge of what to you is right, and what to you is wrong, you will be indecisive in leadership situations. You must have a clear-cut standard of behaviour to guide your thought and actions in order to hold firmly to your integrity.