John Jonas promotes managers from within his outsourced teams in the Philippines rather than hiring externally. He rotates trusted people into new roles, has them train replacements, then elevates them to manager positions with explicit authority and QA oversight to catch mistakes.
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Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing to the Philippines. This is episode 411, promoting a manager from within your team. So I always get people telling me, oh, I want to hire a project manager for this and have them hire these people and have them manage. And that's fine. It's hard. I'll just be honest. It's hard to do that. It's hard to do that in the Philippines. Not that you can't do it, but like I talked about a couple episodes ago, you have to gain their trust. And if you don't gain their trust, then them managing a team is just not. It's not likely to be effective. I had a guy come back to me once and say, oh, John, I tried this whole thing. I hired 20 people to do SEO and nothing ever happened. And I had a manager. And like, well, yeah, I mean, I can't think of. I can't think of anybody I know who hired 20 people at once and expected it to work where you just stick a manager in charge of it like that. You know, if you want to hire 20 people at once, you could probably have to hire a business that is already doing that. Right? Not just bringing in new people. So rather than hiring a project manager up front, which I have never done, I've only promoted from within. I've always hired people to do the tasks. And then as we grow, we get bigger, we have too much going on. Then I promote someone who looks like this could work for them. So a few years ago, I promoted Jovan to manage our. To manage onlinejobs.ph it took me a lot of years to get him to the point where I could have him manage online jobs. But it became obvious over the years that he is really, really dedicated. He's really detail oriented. He's good, he's good with people. He's already looking out for our people. This makes sense. I recently promoted Jessica to managing our SEO project and our social media project. So she's not doing any of the work on those. She's just managing the people. Those. Well, Jessica has worked for me since 2009, so let me tell you how I've done this. So number one, I hired them to do something in the business. So with both of them, they got really good at it. They got really good at that thing. And then I moved them on to other things. Now, this wasn't intentional. I didn't do this with the intent of, oh, you're going to become a project Manager. At some point, I just moved them as we had needs as. As I saw this thing that they're doing isn't working so well anymore. Let's move on to something else. So I'll often see people that are like, oh, I have to let this person go because this thing isn't working anymore, and I'll hire someone new to do something else. Well, that's not how I work. I don't ever want to let someone go if I don't have to. And so rather than letting them go, as things change, I just had them evolve with it and they learned other new things, which that led to them understanding the business really, really well. There were quite a few things where they had started doing it, and then we realized, okay, we need to do more of this, and I want you to do this other thing, so let's hire someone else to do that first thing, and you teach them to do that first thing. So, like, Joven would teach someone else, or Jessica would teach someone else to do the thing they were doing, and they would move on to doing something else. And after a while, we had done that two or three times, and it became clear, okay, you should probably manage these three people that we've hired that are doing things that you previously did. So the next piece of that was giving him authority to manage those people and to manage the processes and the results that came with a title. And so the title and authority are actually a really big deal in the Philippines, where for a lot of years, I didn't do this. I didn't know, I didn't understand. People really thrive with a title, and they need to know who's in charge of the output or the outcome of this thing, because if they're not explicitly stated as the person in charge of the outcome of this thing, well, then you're the one in charge of the outcome of that thing, and they'll pass the buck to you. But when they're in charge, which is what I did with Joven and with Jessica, I made them in charge of, like, if social media is not working, that's your fault, right? And I didn't say it in those terms, but it's on you to make sure this works. So, like, when we make a post, that post better be good and it better be helpful to the business, because that's on you to say, is the quality there. Is this relevant? That's not on me. That was a really big deal, giving them authority and a title. Also to help them with this, I gave. I added a QA person to our team, where this QA person also has authority to tell anybody they're doing their quality assurance work for say, hey, there's a problem here. And the QA person does that. Sometimes. He'll say, hey, this is not a good topic. Actually, just recently I sent a topic to my team and they wrote a blog post about it because I had sent it to them and the QA guy said, no, this is bad. Like, not that the blog post is bad, but the topic is bad for this and this and this reason. It was really good to see. So even though I have managers over that thing, he was still able to step in and help improve the process with. And he's willing to do that because he trusts me. And the managers are willing to manage the process and say. And say to their team, hey, no, this thing needs to be better than it is because they trust me. And that's the last piece of this, which I've talked about in a previous podcast episode. Trust. I trust Joven and Joven trusts me. And same thing with Jessica and same thing with Julia and same thing with Elijah, and same thing with so many people on my team where we have this trust between each other. And that's really, really critical because when I first promoted Joven to be the manager of onlinejobs ph, he was really scared. He was really scared he would make mistakes, and he did. He made a lot of mistakes and he's still making mistakes. And that's okay. I correct things and. But he really helps push projects forward and he trusts that it. If he makes a mistake, I'm not going to fire him. I'm just going to say, hey, I don't like this. And so he's willing to make decisions and make suggestions and improve things as he sees fit because he trusts me that if I see something wrong, I'm going to come in and correct it without having him be embarrassed or without him losing face or without him losing his job or he's not going to get paid less. He trusts me. So the last thing that I want to talk about with that is it wasn't easy. It wasn't easy with, well, with either of them or with a couple other people that I've promoted to managing. It still took some of my time to manage them, managing other people and to teach them how that role worked. And frankly, I'm not a big systems guy. I'm not. I wasn't sure how that role would work because I often was in that role and I wasn't sure how passing it off to someone else would work. And so it took time. And that's part of this. You hire someone, you get some things off of your plate, which gives you the time to allow to bring that manager up to speed. Now, you may have a better way of doing this, I don't know. I'm just telling you how I've done it. And for me it has worked to the tune of, you know, like an eight figure business and 17 hour work weeks for lots and lots of years now. So I'm not saying you can't do it, I'm just telling you what has worked for me. And promoting from within has worked really, really well for me.
