What if the person you are preparing to promote is the wrong person for the job? Imagine your superstar has been promoted! Six months later, their team struggles, misses deadlines, and former high performers start to resist.
What went wrong?
The worker was creative, productive, and had a great relationship with the top brass. It looked like a sensible choice to promote such an individual. But somewhere between being a great individual contributor and turning into a leader, things began to shift.
This situation demands that leadership development programs in Pakistan, the UK, Ireland, and the Middle East address a critical question: Does being good at a job make someone good at leading the people who do that job?
A sustainable organization needs to distinguish between individual performance and leadership potential.
The Promotion Trap: Rewards Performance, Not Readiness
Many organizations promote employees because they are reliable, technically competent, and consistently outperform their peers. These attributes matter, but they don’t necessarily mean the person is ready for leadership.
Think of a salesperson who routinely achieves sales goals and objectives. They know their customers and are effective at negotiating and bringing in big revenues. They seem to be the “ obvious candidate to fill each job opening when a sales manager role comes up.
But being a good personal salesperson is not enough to master sales team management. A manager needs to train underperforming staff, address misunderstandings and disagreements, assign tasks, and get things done.
The same person who did exceptionally well on his own might struggle to delegate, getting impatient with others who don’t perform as well. This isn’t necessarily a lack of character or skill! It could be because the employee’s skills and talents don’t align with the job requirements.
A 2021 systematic review in Human Resource Management Review found mixed evidence on how employee performance relates to leadership performance. Simply put, organizations can’t afford to risk losing their best performers by making them their best leaders.
So, for HR professionals, the takeaway is clear: promotions should take into account the skills needed for the next role as well as their performance.
Why Technical Excellence Is Not Enough
Leadership ushers in a new set of responsibilities. Managers shouldn’t focus on getting jobs done; they must create an environment where others can do the work.
Three skills are of special significance.
1. Emotional Intelligence and self-awareness
Leaders regularly face frustration, conflict, and competing priorities, and must handle challenging conversations. They can affect team relationships by identifying their emotions, understanding others’ perspectives, and responding positively.
It can be a problem when an employee becomes defensive after another employee criticizes their decision, as they may perform poorly when another employee reports directly to them. A confident person might not accept that the other employee contributed.
In a 2018 meta-analysis of 27,330 participants, researchers found emotional intelligence to be a moderately positive predictor of leadership effectiveness (Bucyk et al., 2018).
Emotional intelligence alone is not enough to make someone an effective leader. Still, it is a key factor to consider in evaluating leadership readiness.
2. Delegation and people development.
Solving problems quickly and independently can be a key way high-performing individuals build their reputations. But managers should avoid solving every problem themselves.
A manager who continually takes on others’ roles can achieve quick short-term success but erode the team’s skills in the long term.
Good leaders set clear standards, provide the right support, and enable staff to learn from experience. They realize the successful performance of their team is vital to their success, and that they cannot be successful alone.
3. Communication and stakeholder management
Key aspects of leadership include ensuring that everyone understands expectations, addressing conflict, shaping decisions, and fostering interdepartmental relationships.
Technical knowledge can help determine the right answer, but leadership requires articulating it, building consensus, and leading execution.
Even the smartest and most diligent manager can struggle to harness collective power without these skills.
The Leadership Promotion Problem With Assumptions
In some organizations, senior executives base promotions on reputation, relationships, length of service, trust in a specific worker, or a “hunch.”
These factors can influence decisions without sufficient evidence that someone is ready for leadership.
For instance, if an employee has been doing a wonderful job, the department head may want to recommend them. But no one has looked at that employee’s conflict management style, how he reacts to criticism, how he treats other employees, or what he does when he gets stressed.
The organization then discovers these gaps when the consequences hit the team after the promotion.
A better approach combines performance records, structured leadership assessments, behavioral evidence, and opportunities to demonstrate relevant abilities.
This is where leadership assessment and executive coaching can help leaders make better decisions. Assessments can evaluate the key skills relevant to organizations, and coaching can help future leaders identify learning gaps and prepare for more responsibility.
Neither is a sure way to achieve success. Care is needed when interpreting assessments, and coaching is not a solution for every individual mismatch. However, they can complement evidence of actual workplace behavior to better inform promotion decisions.
How Pakistani Organizations Can Improve Promotion Readiness
Organizations don’t have to abandon merit-based promotion. They need a more precise definition of merit.
Some of the steps below can assist HR managers in making better decisions.
Evaluate needs for a new position.
Determine behaviors, responsibilities, and capabilities needed before selecting a candidate. Being a successful technical specialist and an effective department manager may require different strengths.
Don’t base your expectations on previous performance. Review candidates’ work on collaboration and how they receive and act on feedback, disagreement, and ways to enhance colleagues. Inevitably use particular instances and avoid just general statements.
Provide opportunities to exhibit leadership.
Assign projects, mentor, give cross-functional assignments, or have potential candidates take temporary charge of teams. Wait and see how they do it before booking!
Offer focused leadership development.
Provide training, mentoring, and executive coaching to fill in gaps identified. Link development to the challenges candidates will face, not a generic management program.
Check on progress following promotion.
Set ground rules and communicate frequently during the transition. Help new managers get used to their role before problems set in.
Promotion Should Be the Beginning of Development
A promotion acknowledges past achievements and introduces new duties. If it is used only as a reward, employers and employees will have no recourse.
For HR directors and business leaders, the objective should not be to identify employees who have never struggled. It should be to identify people who can learn, adapt, work effectively with others, and accept leadership responsibilities.
Great organizations know that there is value in proving, developing, and continually assessing leadership potential.
The question is not just, “Who has done the best job in the current role? It’s the one who is ready to make it happen next.
A Question for HR Leaders
Should organizations promote their best performers or their most leadership-ready employees?