☕ CoffeeChat Weekly
☕ CoffeeChat Weekly
Opportunities & Insights from Across Our Community
Hi everyone, here’s what we have for you this week:
Promotions can require a combination of performance and trust. In this week’s episode of The Everyday Leader, we hear from Samantha from Raise, who shares about her experience of earning a promotion to Customer Success Manager. Listen here.
Middle managers have high expectations for promotions. Our 2022 Manager Growth Survey results indicated over 90% expect another promotion within the next two years. Check out the full results here.
Planning your team’s 2023 leadership development programs? Reach out to our team at CoffeeChat if you’d like to discuss options of how to include 1:1 professional and peer coaching. Get in touch here.
Read on for more details…
Earning promotions through both performance and trust, setting internal expectations through SOPs, and building a customer council
Here are a few highlights from the conversation with Samantha:
Promotions require both strong performance and trust: During her first two years at the Kenya-based startup, Raise, Marion served as the Customer Success Lead. During the this time she built trust with the co-founders and management team by working hard and being a team player. When it came time to review compensation and restructure the team for continued growth, the conversation to gain additional responsibilities, and a “manager” title, was a more straight-forward decision.
Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) can help set expectations across teams: In her new role, Samantha has leaned heavily on developing and following SOPs to ensure the right communication channels are used and the right issues from customers are escalated within the teams. This helps her manage her team and work streams, while aligning with her manager when appropriate.
Customer councils provide a structure for customer advocacy: In her role, Samantha has overseen the creation of a customer council that gives an opportunity for the customer perspective to be considered for every major product strategy decision. This initiative is alongside efforts to make her customer success team more easily available to customers during their engagement with the Raise platform. These strategies have helped capture insights from customers that have led to important improvements and new features.
Most Middle Managers Expect a Promotion In <2 years
CoffeeChat's 2022 Manager Growth Survey was a pulse check of how managers at companies across Africa feel about the leadership development opportunities and resources available to them. We heard from managers at over 100 companies, and have highlighted a number of important trends. Check out the results here.
One key insight was related to expectations of middle managers for when they will next earn a promotion. An overwhelming number (88%) of respondents were optimistic that they would be promoted either within the next 6 months or at least within the next 2 years. Implications for senior leaders and HR teams include the need to:
align career aspirations of manager cohort with the reality of your organization
highlight full range of opportunities, including horizontal growth
provide sufficient leadership development support to build healthy pipeline