Making Promotions Work — Fast

Promoting someone is almost always a positive event for an organization. A person’s past accomplishments are recognized and a new opportunity is created for the person and the organization. It’s very exciting and energizing when someone gets a promotion. But newly promoted people often struggle with significant changes to their role and work. Many of the attitudes and capabilities that caused them to get promoted are not useful for their new role and can even hinder their success.

One of the biggest challenges companies face when promoting from within is to make sure that the employee is properly trained for their new role. Companies never know exactly when a promotion will occur and which, of many possible roles, will need support. Also, it can often take months, or even years, for that person to come up to speed and become a highly productive in the new role.

How can companies overcome these hurdles? The Cerebyte team has developed Sofia which is an online, neuroscience-based, self-guided learning platform that helps organizations quickly and efficiently capture and organize knowledge of top performers in the target role in as little as 2-6 hours. It then guides the newly promoted to learn the new role in 8-20 hours, faster than ever possible before. You say it can’t be done? I beg to differ.

One high technology company we worked with found that when they promoted high-performing individuals to managers, they weren’t able to effectively lead a group. This is a common problem as many people who are star performers are never trained to be a group leader. Using Sofia, it took someone who had successfully made the transition from individual contributor just 90 minutes to develop a comprehensive training program for how to make the transition. Newly promoted people completed this program in as little as 2-3 weeks, turning them into great team leaders.

How successful could your organization be if your just promoted people were immediately effective in their new roles?