Is promotion to management a poisoned chalice?

The impact of promoting unprepared managers

Managers that lack leadership skills negatively impact their teams, so why do we keep promoting without training? 

Picture the scene; you have a star performer in your technical team of experts. This person shines above the rest, working diligently and delivering for customers, partners, and the team. This individual’s contribution benefits the collective group, ensuring goals, objectives, and purpose are met. In short, they are the very definition of a team player. 

You want to reward this person, as they clearly have great potential, are a valuable member of the company and deserve to be recognised for their hard work and dedication. The obvious next step is a promotion, and in many organisations, this means a management role of some kind such as team leader, supervisor, or manager.

Promotion as a reward

The benefit of promoting a valuable employee is that they feel recognised and rewarded. They are less likely to seek opportunities elsewhere if they feel acknowledged for their individual contribution. Additionally, by promoting from within it sends a positive message to employees that the company is actively recognising and rewarding in-house talent.

What most companies fail to appreciate is that a promotion to management is effectively a cross-functional move. The newly anointed manager is changing their role, from being a specialist within the team (an engineer, scientist, lawyer, accountant, software developer...) to being a manager of people. It’s a completely different job, from individual contributor to people leader, and requires a different set of skills that the employee, most likely, doesn’t have.

Expertise is not the same as experience

I remember when I worked at a large fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) company, according to the employee survey results, the Assistant Brand Managers were the least happy, suffered the most stress and were the most likely to leave. Many hung on in there in the hope of being promoted out of their misery. For this cohort were managed by a group of newly-promoted Senior Brand Managers, none of whom had any previous management experience. No timely training, was given to how the new Senior Brand Managers would lead and manage others. Low and behold the outcome was an unhappy, demotivated team and a destabilising churn rate within the department.

Too often employees are rewarded with promotions for the excellent work they do in their specialist area. It’s assumed that as experts in their current job, they will naturally succeed in managing others doing the same role. The reality is companies are promoting their best technical expert and gaining a bad manager. A double bad whammy. Who wants that?

Shadow of the untrained manager

As the saying goes, people don’t leave bad companies, they leave bad managers. The practice of promoting without training is surprisingly common and it doesn’t just negatively impact the team, it also affects the bottom line.

Without the right management training, the newly promoted manager reverts to their comfort zone by meddling in the technical work that their team should be doing. They delve into the project powered by the belief that more hands make light work and thinking that a team of 5 can become a more productive team of 6. The new manager doesn’t realise that their task is to lead the team, to motivate and inspire them to contribute in a way that creates a collective contribution equivalent to a team of 20.

When a manager gets too involved in the technical work of the team, the individual members start to feel disempowered, like they are not trusted and will respond by checking out altogether or being (consciously or unconsciously) disruptive. The team is no longer greater than the sum of its parts and the new manager has inadvertently created a drain on resources and a contribution sink.

Skilled managers are good for business

A trained manager not only boosts individual contribution across the team, but they also retain and motivate employees, thereby reducing the headaches and costs associated with turnover. Great managers attract, hire, and inspire great people, which in turn, increases the company’s ability to deal with gaps in the talent pipeline. Good managers lead productive and effective teams that punch above their weight in both performance and contribution to the business as a whole.