We’ve all seen it happen. A new management position opens up within the company. After a couple rounds of interviews, your jaw hits the floor when Steve, a 20-year career man with the empathy of a door stop, lands the role.
Prioritizing time-in-company is not a problem—retaining skills and knowledge clearly benefits the company overall. But when such talent is left drifting without any leadership training, or simply have no interest in actually managing anything, problems arise.
Even with the best will in the world, a brilliant engineer with 15 years’ experience can’t simply manifest skills like empathy, conflict resolution, schedule management, and budgeting. As a consequence, when such people are promoted, the outcomes can be catastrophic.
So, why do many companies give promotions this way—and what do they expect to happen?
Why do companies reward tenure over talent?
Careers are built on climbing ladders. But for technical workers specifically, there are only so many rungs they can climb:
- Apprentice
- Graduate
- Engineer
- Senior engineer
- Lead or principal engineer
Eventually, if a worker wants increased responsibility or salary, the next rung has to be management. Say your principal engineer has been in the same role for 10 years. They’re doing great work and want a promotion—more responsibilities, more impact, more salary.
But they recognize they’re not manager-material. It’s not their thing. In most cases, you just have nothing to offer them. There isn’t an unlimited budget for good workers and ultimately, they’ll need to take a job elsewhere if it’s available.
And there’s what usually happens: They take the management role anyway. Which can be the best-case scenario…
Successful appointments are a boon for any company
Assuming a current employee is a good fit for a management promotion, there are massive benefits to the company versus hiring externally.
For a start, it’s empowering for all employees. Knowing there are long-term career opportunities increases engagement, productivity, and the sense of camaraderie that underpins most successful teams.
On a more pragmatic level, long-serving employees have a deep knowledge and appreciation of the company’s culture, processes, and clients. Losing that experience can have a profound impact. Sometimes companies prioritize keeping that person over promoting them, necessarily, to a suitable role. And it may well be the best choice for broader company success.
For example, if you work in finance and one person has been there for 25 years and is the only person with critical information and answers, you can’t afford to let them go. If retaining them means promoting them to management, that’s what needs to happen—as long as the appointment comes with adequate training.
But the threat of the Peter Principle remains
Promoting ill-suited technical experts to management roles is a classic example of the Peter Principle. It states:
“In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.”
In other words, workers get continually promoted until they reach a role for which they are actually unqualified. And once they reach that position, they will stop being promoted because they’re no longer offering anything of value.
It’s a sad, but relentlessly accurate, principle.
Unqualified managers kill teams
A tiny percentage of people take effortlessly to management. They move into the role and their personality is naturally well-tuned to management.
But for everyone else, management is a hard and complex skill that requires training to reach basic competence. Being a manager certainly goes beyond simply enforcing deadlines, setting goals, and delegating tasks.
It involves creating an environment where team members can perform at their best and grow both personally and professionally. A good manager coaches, motivates, and inspires their team, provides constructive feedback, helps to resolve conflicts, and supports team members in their career development. Not to mention more technical aspects like budgeting, managing schedules or recruitment.
What business expects this to work without training?
The real risks of badly-prepared managers
When individuals are promoted to management positions without proper preparation and support, negative traits can dominate despite good intentions. For example:
- Micromanagement—A horrible managerial trait, micromanagement almost always comes from a place of insecure good intentions. Terrified that work won’t be completed to standard, new managers will minutely follow and dictate to their team, often neglecting their own work in the process. This can cause rifts and stress within the team. Sure, there are ways to work with micromanagers. but it’s not great for anyone.
- Lack of delegation—For the same reason as above, managers might take all the responsibility themselves. An insane decision that never works out, this usually makes other employees feel under-appreciated, untrusted, and unwanted. Even if the manager completes the work, they are depriving team members of any chance to contribute or grow in their role.
- Bias—Internal promotions mean managers with friends beneath them. Without proper training, this can lead to favoritism and an unfair distribution of tasks, benefits, or other treatment.
- No team development—Since untrained managers tend to prioritize task completion, there is less time dedicated to long-term progression, skills training, feedback, or mentoring.
How to effectively train new managers
Leading a team requires skills like communication, emotional intelligence, conflict resolution, and the ability to motivate and inspire others. These aren’t typically required for technical roles and so most employees aren’t strong in these areas.
However, they can absolutely be taught. So the first thing companies must do is invest in quality leadership training. Options include:
- Mentoring and coaching
- In-house training
- Online learning platforms
- Job rotations
Successful training doesn’t just improve the manager’s performance. It has a significant cascade effect on their team members. Low morale, decreased productivity, and staff turnover are all symptoms of poor management. Not to mention that promoting someone to a brand-new role without training will be immensely stressful for that employee.
The key is to help the new manager understand their role and responsibilities, then guide them in the right general direction. Once they have their priorities sorted, and are committed to them, they can progress to learning on the job.
A managerial alternative for large, forward-looking companies
When we talk about management in the general sense, as we have in this article, it’s fundamentally about person management. But certain organizations (for example, large engineering firms) can create separate managerial pathways: person manager and technical manager.
The technical role would extend beyond individual contribution to the oversight of all technical contributions for a team. This could involve setting tasks or assignments, fielding questions, mentorship or other areas. However, responsibility for team member support and growth would fall to the person manager.
For brands looking for a ‘best of both worlds’ answer, this could be it. It allows them to keep valuable company knowledge and skills in-house, without negatively affecting team morale or performance, while giving the strong technical contributor a long-term growth opportunity.
If promotion isn’t right, hard decisions must be made
There are two types of employee that get promoted from technical to management roles:
- Those who want to become managers and leaders
- Those who want to stay at the company…but aren’t truly interested in leadership
All businesses should treasure that first cohort. Invest in their training and support. Give them a mentor or accountability buddy. Help them to leverage their vast company experience into their new role.
But the second group? Some workers simply outgrow their role. If they are pushing hard for a promotion, and the only option is management, you might have to make the hard decision of saying no—it’s better for the company overall to hire externally or select a better in-house candidate.
No matter who you decide to promote to a management role, your biggest priority is ensuring they are both comfortable and competent in that role. From there, teams will thrive and the business will have sound foundations.
To ensure you’re promoting the right people, you can begin with assessments to identify their skill gaps and see their aptitude. 360 assessments can shine a spotlight on hidden strengths and blindspots, showing you the skillsets of different employees.
Ready to get started? Sogolytics can help! Let’s get in touch and we’d love to help you strategize how you can identify the aptitude of your employees and promote the right people to build a strong corporate culture.
