The Real Reason Your Best People Struggle After a Promotion (And How to Stop It)
Astrix
Last Update 3 bulan yang lalu
Some of the worst decisions in business aren't 𝐡𝐢𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 the wrong person.
They're 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐦𝐨𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 the right person into the wrong seat.
It's like taking the best goalkeeper on your football team and making them the striker because they "showed leadership."
Sure, they're athletic. Sure, they're committed.
Sure, everyone respects them.
But now your goals have stopped and your goal post has no one standing in front of it.
We've seen :
- The best engineer becomes the engineering manager… and now they manage calendars instead of code, and quietly hate Mondays.
- The top salesperson gets promoted to Head of Sales… and suddenly the team that loved them now avoids them because they micromanage every deal.
- The loyal employee who's "been here the longest" becomes team lead… and discovers that loyalty and leadership are two very different sports.
Nobody got fired. Nobody did anything wrong.
But somehow, you lost your best player & created a bad manager in one move.
That's a compatibility problem hiding inside a "reward."
Most companies promote based on :
- Who performed best in the current role.
- Who's been here the longest.
- Who will be upset if they don't get promoted.
We should also evaluate :
- Is this person's natural behaviour actually 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐛𝐥𝐞 with what the new role demands every single day ?
- Will they energise the people below them… or slowly drain them?
- Are we promoting them because they'll be great at it, or because we don't know how else to say "thank you"?
At Astrix2u, we think about promotion the same way we think about hiring – through 𝒃𝒆𝒉𝒂𝒗𝒊𝒐𝒖𝒓𝒂𝒍 𝒄𝒐𝒎𝒑𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒃𝒊𝒍𝒊𝒕𝒚.
Because the saddest version of this story isn't the person who fails.
It's the person who ̶s̶u̶c̶c̶e̶e̶d̶s̶ in the old role, gets promoted as a reward, struggles quietly in the new one, and then everyone.. including them.. 𝒘𝒐𝒏𝒅𝒆𝒓𝒔 𝒘𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒉𝒆𝒄𝒌 𝒘𝒆𝒏𝒕 𝒘𝒓𝒐𝒏𝒈.
The answer is simple :
Nothing went wrong with the person.
The seat changed. The patterns didn't match. And nobody checked.
#leadership #management #humanresources