Workplace: Rapid, Untimely Promotions

Rapid, Untimely Promotions

We all have heard people (especially CEOs and rapidly-promoted employees) talking about rapid promotions in a very positive light, citing benefits like retaining top talent, accelerated learning, new perspectives, workplace competition, reputation and cost saving, but they want us to overlook the disadvantages of such actions which will eventually make the entire organisations pay dearly.

Promoting employees too quickly can have several drawbacks, and damage the organisation in the long run. I have divided the potential drawbacks (casualties) into three categories that impact three levels of any organisation.

Casualty 1: Clients

Untimely and rapid promotions can affect customer relationships, especially if employees with limited experience are in customer-facing roles. There are multiple instances in which experience is of utmost criticality, and inexperienced employees can further worsen a bad situation with a client. In that case, customer satisfaction and loyalty will take a direct hit and make it very difficult (almost impossible) to bounce back with the client or get more business from them. We also risk getting negative reviews of damaging “word of mouth” publicity.

Casualty 2: Employees

The second organisational level, employees, can be impacted negatively and hence having their performance affected negatively, translating directly into business loss. Some of the major impacts are:

1. Lowered Morale

If promotions are seen as being granted without tenure, arbitrarily or without merit, it will lead to resentment and lowered morale among other employees who have worked longer and harder for professional growth. This will negatively impact teamwork and productivity along with their mental and physical wellbeing.

2. Burnout

Promotions often come with increased responsibilities and workloads. With rapid promotions, employees will struggle to cope with the demands of their new roles, leading to burnout, stress, and decreased job satisfaction. This will also impact their subordinates and set a bad precedent of inefficient seniority in an organisation. 

3. Skill Gaps

With quick promotions, employees will not get the opportunity to develop all the necessary skills and competencies for their new roles. Skill gaps can hinder their ability to perform effectively and may require additional training and development, causing resource wastage. This will again impact the overall culture of the organisation where the newly-hired employees will feel frustrated for reporting to inexperienced and incompetent supervisors. 

4. Experience Gap

Rapid promotions may result in individuals being placed in roles that they are not adequately prepared for. Inexperienced employees in critical positions can make costly mistakes and fail to meet performance expectations. They will make decisions based on sentiments and ignore objectivity and empirical evidence. Inexperienced people at higher organisational levels will never be able to do justice to the organisational culture, leading to bias, favouritism, injustice and professional degradation of the workplace.

Casualty 3: Employers

For employers, the loss will be much dearer than employees or the clients who can both switch at any time. Some major problems that the employers will face are:

1. Loss of Talent

Promoting particular employees too quickly will result in a revolving door of talent. As individuals move up quickly, they may seek out new opportunities elsewhere, leaving the organisation with a talent vacuum and increased recruitment and training costs. When an employee is promoted to a senior level after just a few months, the other organisations take these employees as HVA’s (High-Value Assets) and double down on their poaching strategies, extracting that pool out and causing an organisation to be left in a chaotic abyss.

2. Knowledge Loss

By promoting employees too quickly, employers will not provide them with enough time to completely grasp the intricacies of their current roles. This will lead to a loss of valuable institutional knowledge, as they move up before transferring their expertise to others. Pushing people up, without assessing their understanding of their current roles and responsibilities will always lead to them skipping processes while handling any professional situations. This will lead to a place with supervisors and managers who have insufficient knowledge of their domain, supervision and management.

3. Degradation of Organisational Culture

An imbalance in promotions will lead to a culture where growth is seen as arbitrary or based on favouritism rather than merit. Employees will prefer sycophancy and bootlicking rather than putting in efforts towards the common corporate goals and culture. This can erode trust and transparency within the organisation, leading to an unstoppable domino effect that knocks down the foundations of organisational culture and respect. Within such organisations, new employees will find it difficult to show respect towards their seniors, thus creating a hostile and toxic environment for tenured as well as fresh talent. The word will eventually go out and tarnish the image of the entire organisation.

4. Weak Planning

Unfair and rapid promotions can disrupt succession planning efforts. If potential future leaders are promoted prematurely, it will leave gaps in the leadership pipeline and hinder the organisation's ability to plan for the long-term. This can happen partially because of unqualified employees handling critical roles and thus forcing the organisation to take decisions that it will eventually regret. Mass hiring talent because of a seasonal spurt of the clientele, promoting other new-to-the-organisation employees to key and critical positions, allowing unreliable, toxic and incapable employees write policies and dictate rules, sabotaging projects and planning because of bias, devaluing and sacrificing tenured employee due to discrimination, are all the effects of weak business planning and mindless promotions.  

5. Financial Implications

Promoting employees quickly can be costly, both in terms of increased salaries and potential expenses associated with addressing performance issues or skill gaps. On one hand, organisations will pay more to the employees post promotions and on the other hand, spend a lot of money on their performance improvement and skill-gap redressal. With their inexperience, handling clients will become a troubling task and directly lead to withering C-Sat scores, causing exhaustion of the Customer Satisfaction Teams. This will also cause friction within the teams for losing customers after letting incompetent people handle them.