You can give employees knowledge and have them practice skills, but without that innate talent your company will need twice as many employees to perform the same amount of work as your competitors. Your approach needs to align withy our personal and company values orguiding principles. That is, how you treat people. If fairness and honesty have been the core of your success so far, then those things need to also be considered when dealing with this issue.
Honesty is always the best way to handle these very sensitive issues. You need to talk to her and tell her that you are not being fair to her. You have placed her in a position that she does not have the right talent for. Next, tell her you are going to make a change in her role and you need her help. The goal is to find a position, or create a new one, where she can continue to share her many years of knowledge, the skills she has learned over time while helping you grow the company. Most important, she needs a position that will allow her to share her special, innate talent.
The next step is to have her take the Gallup talent assessment. The book "Now Discover Your Strengths" contains a code to enter the online assessment tool on the Gallup Web site (
www.gallup.com). While she is busy discovering her unique set of talents, you need to be thinking about jobs that growing companies need. For example, a quality assurance coordinator makes sure everyone is carrying out the company's policies and procedures. This would be an excellent position for someone who is familiar with all the jobs in the company and probably wrote a great many of the policies and procedures herself. Additionally, she could keep her role as a member of the senior-management team so that she still has the access to you and to special information that the senior management team is privy to. Another good place for your employee would be in public relations. Your company is growing and most likely doesn't have a designated public relations point person, someone who represents the company in the community. Most likely, your marketing or sales people are doing this, but it is really not a good use of their time.
The most important thing here is to find out her talent and be sure to find her a job that already exists in the company or one that you can create that uses those talents every day. It is important that she is engaged in this process rather than it just being a top-down decision.
The next step is to develop a job description, if one does not already exist, and to decide on a salary range. It is very possible that the new job will not have the same salary and benefits, such as bonus structure, that her present job has. It is important that she understands that she will not be earning the same salary, since her skills set does not warrant the higher salary. You can handle the salary issue in a variety of ways. You can freeze her salary, which means if everyone else receives salary adjustments she will not until her present salary fits into the new range; you can give her a period of time that her present salary will continue and a date her new salary will kick in or you can just decrease her salary to fit the new range. If the salary differential is substantial, it is best to give her sometime to get her personal finances in line with her new salary. Paying her the same salary should never be an option, since it sends a negative message to everyonewho is privy to salary information.
The last thing that you need to handle is how you tell the staff of the change. It is best to let her decide the approach that best suits her. You set the date and let her set the method of communication.
You are the most important person in your company. Everyone looks to how you treat others. Fairness and honestly in dealing with employees is always the best policy.
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