The Promotion Trap
There's a moment most organisations get badly wrong. It happens quietly, with the best of intentions, and it costs more than anyone wants to admit.
Someone is brilliant at their job. Really brilliant. So you promote them.
And then you watch them struggle.
Why expertise doesn't transfer
It seems logical, doesn't it? If someone is exceptional at something, surely they'd be good at leading others who do it? But the assumption falls apart almost immediately when you test it against reality.
The best software developer in your team isn't necessarily wired to coach junior developers through their frustrations, hold difficult performance conversations, or think strategically about where the function needs to be in three years. The finest accountant in the room doesn't automatically have the emotional intelligence to lead a finance team through a restructure.
Being brilliant at something and being brilliant at developing others who do that something are genuinely different skills. Different aptitudes. Different motivations. The overlap is smaller than most organisations want to believe.
What a running club taught me about leadership
I'm a run leader with Bedford Harriers. We're a big club, over 500 members and more than 40 coach leaders. Of those coaches, maybe five are elite runners.
The rest of us didn't get the role because we were the fastest. We got it because we're drawn to developing other people. We can manage groups, read a situation, adapt a risk assessment on the move, and bring someone who's struggling back into the fold without making them feel like they've let anyone down.
And we didn't just step into that role one day. We completed the UK Athletics qualification programme first. Then ten observed coaching sessions, assessed by an experienced coach in the club. Only after that were we approved to lead our own groups.
Think about that for a moment. A volunteer running club invests more in preparing its coaches than many organisations invest in preparing their first-time managers.
The cost of skipping the preparation
When organisations promote without preparing, the consequences tend to follow a predictable pattern. The new manager defaults to doing what they're good at, which is the individual contributor work, because that's where their confidence lives. The team doesn't get managed so much as supervised. Development conversations don't happen. Frustrations build quietly.
And the person at the centre of it all? They often feel like they're failing. Not because they're not capable, but because nobody gave them the tools, the framework, or the time to build a genuinely different set of skills before they needed them.
This is what I see most often when I'm brought in to work with organisations on their leadership development programmes. The gap isn't talent. It's preparation.
Invest before, not during
The best organisations I work with understand something that sounds almost too simple: you skill someone before you ask them to do the job, not once they're already deep in it and struggling to keep their head above water.
That means tiered development that starts early. Skills training for aspiring managers before they become managers. Coaching conversations that help people understand what the leadership role actually demands, emotionally and practically, before they step into it.
The expertise doesn't go away when someone moves into leadership. If anything, it becomes an asset. But only when it's paired with genuine leadership capability: the ability to listen, to set clear purpose, to establish simple goals, to check in regularly, and to put the development of others at the centre of everything.
That's when the expert becomes the leader who makes others exceptional too.
The question worth sitting with
If you've recently promoted your best person into management, or you're thinking about doing it, it's worth asking honestly: what have you put in place to support that transition? Not a buddy system or a vague "ask if you need anything." What structured preparation have you given them?
The answer to that question will tell you a lot about what the next twelve months are likely to look like for them, and for you.
If you're watching someone you promoted struggle, or you want to get ahead of it before it happens, drop me a message. I work with organisations to build leadership development that fits your people and your business, at the point in their career when it's actually going to make a difference.
