In brief
- Most companies promote the person who’s best at the job. Leading people is a different job.
- Strong numbers show what someone delivered. They don’t show how.
- When the promotion goes wrong, the company usually blames the person instead of the decision.
It’s one of the most common decisions in business, and it feels like the safest. Someone has been the top performer for years. They hit every number. When the manager role opens, they’re the obvious choice. Nobody even debates it.
Six months later, their team is quieter than it used to be. A couple of good people have asked to transfer. The new manager is working longer hours than ever, doing half the team’s work themselves.
What happened?
The myth: your best performer will make your best leader
The logic seems airtight. They know the work better than anyone. They’ve proven they can deliver. Who better to lead the people who do it?
Here’s why that logic breaks.
Reason 1: leading is a different job
An individual contributor succeeds by doing the work. A manager succeeds by getting the work done through other people. Those are different jobs that happen to share a line on the org chart.
The skills that made someone a great performer, speed, precision, doing it themselves, can work against them as a manager. The fastest way to get it done is still to do it yourself. That’s how good performers turn into managers who never let go.
Reason 2: the numbers don’t show how they got there
A top performer’s results tell you what they delivered. They say nothing about how. Did they hit the number by helping the people around them, or by stepping over them? Did coworkers seek them out, or work around them?
If nobody asked those questions before the promotion, the team finds out the answers afterward.
Reason 3: you never defined what leading looks like here
Most companies can’t say what a good manager looks like at their company specifically. So the promotion decision falls back on the one thing they can measure, which is past performance in a different job.
When you don’t define what leading looks like, you promote whatever got rewarded before.
The truth
Your best performer might be a great leader. Or they might be your best performer, and the company is better off keeping them there and paying them for it. The only way to know is to look at how they work, not just what they’ve delivered, against a clear picture of what leading looks like at your company.
Before the next promotion, ask one question: if this person led the way they work today, would you want to be on their team? Then ask four more. Here’s how that question fits into succession.
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