Is Your Employee Ready to be a Manager?

Many times a company spends a lot of time and money training someone to take on more work and/or responsibility and it never quite works out because they didn't have the mental ability to actually do the job. On the other hand, you may be pleasantly surprised to find out that you have a person who is very smart and definitely worth the investment of time and money.

The Wonderlic test that I recommend consists of 50 questions, takes 12-minutes to complete, and is a very accurate measure of a person's general intelligence. For more information click here.

If the Personality Profile and the Wonderlic Personnel Tests give you positive responses, then you can feel more comfortable moving ahead. Below are some questions to think about to be completely sure the candidates are management ready:

Are they ready to:

• Act more like a coach than a player?

• Step out of the limelight and let their employees get the glory?

• Handle paperwork and details?

• Organize themselves and their employees?

• Be self-motivated and be able to motivate their employees?

• Spend most of their time planning and analyzing others' tasks rather than doing?

• Listen to complaints and resolve their employee's problems?

• Handle personnel issues and possibly fire someone?

Although every organization should continually work to reward top performers, promoting them to management is not always the right answer. Organizations will be better served to come up with more creative ways to reward top performers, while keeping the management positions for those who exemplify the attributes in the testing and in the checklist above.