Why Promotion Doesn't Automatically Make Someone a Good Leader

We do something slightly odd with promotion.

We spend years rewarding someone for being good at their job. They become technically strong, reliable, knowledgeable and probably pretty efficient at solving problems. If something goes wrong, they're the person people find. If there's a difficult piece of work, give it to them. They know how things work and they've built a reputation around being able to get things done.

Eventually we decide they're ready for more responsibility.

So we promote them.

Then almost immediately, we need them to stop doing some of the things we've spent years rewarding them for.

The person who became valuable because they always had the answer now needs to resist giving it. The person who could solve the problem faster than everyone else needs to watch somebody else take twice as long and somehow keep their hands off it. The person who maintained quality by staying close to everything has to work out when being close has become micromanagement.

That's quite a shift.

Yet we often treat promotion as though leadership capability comes bundled with the position.

The promotion changes the person's authority. It changes their responsibilities, their access and probably the expectations other people have of them. What it doesn't do is quietly replace the habits that got them there.

In fact, it often makes those habits more obvious.

Someone who struggled to delegate before promotion now has considerably more to delegate. Someone who disliked conflict now owns more situations where conflict can't simply be avoided. Someone who likes being across every detail suddenly has ten people producing details they can't possibly stay across.

The weakness wasn't created by the promotion, the promotion just gave it more room.

There is another side to this because plenty of the old habits remain enormously useful. Technical credibility matters. Being reliable matters. Knowing how the work actually gets done matters. I've never been particularly convinced by the idea that leaders should somehow float above the technical realities of their teams.

The problem isn't expertise, it's knowing when expertise is helping and when it has started doing somebody else's job for them.

That's a harder transition than it sounds.

If you've spent ten years being rewarded for solving problems, somebody bringing you a problem creates an almost automatic response. You solve it. It feels useful. The employee leaves happy because the problem has disappeared and you probably leave the conversation feeling like you've helped.

You have.

You've also potentially taught them to bring you the next one.

Do that often enough and a strange thing happens. The leader becomes overwhelmed because everyone keeps escalating problems, while the team becomes increasingly dependent on the person complaining that nobody takes enough ownership.

Both sides can be completely sincere about how frustrating the situation has become.

The system makes perfect sense once you look at how it was built.

Delegation has a similar problem. We talk about it as though it's mostly a time-management technique. Give somebody else the task so the leader can focus on more important things.

That's part of it, but delegation also involves tolerating somebody doing something differently from you.

Sometimes slower, sometimes with more mistakes, occasionally better.

That can be uncomfortable for someone whose professional identity has been built around being very good at the work.

It's easy to say, "I need to delegate more." It's much harder to sit there watching someone take an hour to work through something you know you could fix in ten minutes.

That's where the leadership work actually begins.

The same thing happens with difficult conversations. Before promotion, there was often somewhere for the problem to go. A supervisor, manager or someone else with enough authority to deal with it.

After promotion, the conversation has nowhere else to go.

The underperformance. The behaviour everyone is talking about except the person doing it. The employee who's disappointed. The conflict between two capable people who both think the other one is the problem.

These aren't technical problems, which can be deeply frustrating for technically capable people.

There isn't always a correct answer.

You have to judge when to intervene, when to listen, when to let something breathe and when avoiding the conversation has become a decision in itself.

This is why I think organisations sometimes make the transition harder than it needs to be.

We identify a strong performer, promote them and then talk about leadership development as though we're adding something completely new.

Often we're not.

Some of the most important development involves helping someone examine what they already do.

Which behaviours should travel with them?

Which ones need to change?

Which strengths become liabilities when they're overused?

What do they need to stop proving?

That shift from proving capability to developing how your authority and judgement are experienced by others is part of the work explored in Invisible to Influential.

That last question interests me particularly.

Newly promoted leaders can spend an enormous amount of energy proving they deserved the promotion. They stay close to the detail, answer every question, make themselves available for everything and try to demonstrate that they're still the person who can be relied upon.

It makes complete sense.

It can also stop them becoming the leader the new job actually requires.

At some point the evidence of your capability can't be how much work still needs you personally involved in it.

The evidence has to start appearing in other people.

Their judgement gets better. They solve problems without you. They understand what matters. They make decisions you don't need to revisit. They have difficult conversations before you hear about the issue.

Your capability hasn't disappeared.

It's changed where it shows up.

That's part of the progression I think gets lost when we treat leadership as a position rather than something that develops. Capability matters enormously, but it isn't the destination. It needs to become momentum, then presence, then judgement and eventually something that continues to work when you're not in the room.

A promotion can happen on Friday afternoon.

That transition can't.

Maybe that's the expectation we need to change.

The person walking into work on Monday isn't suddenly a different human being because their email signature changed. They're carrying the same strengths, insecurities, instincts and habits they had the week before.

They've just been given a different place to use them.

And leadership starts with working out which ones still belong there.