InsightsLeadership5 min read
Promoting managers without breaking them
Your best individual contributors are not automatically your best managers. What to put around them before you promote.
By Finesse Blumenthal, Founder and Managing Partner.
The most common leadership failure in a growing company is not a bad hire. It is a good promotion, done badly. The strongest engineer becomes the engineering manager, the best seller becomes the sales leader, the most reliable operator gets the team, and six months later the company has lost its best contributor and gained a manager who is quietly drowning.
Nobody did anything wrong by the usual measure. The person deserved it. The team needed a leader. The mistake was treating the promotion as the whole decision, when it is the easy half. The hard half is what you build around the person before you announce it.
Before you promote
Five things to have in place first
None of these require a leadership program. They require a decision, a page, and a calendar, in roughly this order.
A written standard
One page that says what a manager here does: the conversations they hold, the decisions they own, the numbers they are accountable for. Without it, every new manager invents the job, and most invent it as a bigger version of their old one.
A team that is a team
Between five and ten direct reports. Fewer and it is not a management job; more and nobody gets managed. The org chart is a management decision, not an afterthought to a promotion.
A first ninety days with a shape
One-to-ones scheduled before the announcement. A first performance conversation with a date. A named person the new manager can ask the questions they are embarrassed to ask you.
Pay and title that match the job
Promoting someone into a management role on their contributor salary, with a title change as the reward, sets the price of management at zero. They will price it themselves within a year.
An honest reason
If the promotion is a retention move dressed as a development move, say so to yourself first. Some of the best contributors should be paid like managers and left to do what they are best at.
After you promote
How to tell a manager is drowning
New managers rarely say they are struggling. They say they are busy, which is true, and which hides the specific ways the job is not getting done. These are the signs, and by the time you see two of them the team has seen four.
- 01They are still doing their old job, at night, because it is the part they know they are good at.
- 02Their one-to-ones keep getting moved. Then they stop being scheduled.
- 03The team's best person has gone quiet, and the manager has not noticed.
- 04Every decision comes to you, either because they escalate it or because their team goes around them.
- 05Their first performance review of anyone is the one you have to prompt them to hold.
What to do when you see them
Not a course. A conversation with the standard on the table: which of these is the job, which are you doing, and what would need to be true for you to do the rest. Then a decision, in weeks, not quarters. The kindest thing you can do for a manager who does not want the job is give them a good way back.
The measure
Manager capability, measured not assumed
A company that promotes on merit and then never checks whether the job is being done is not developing managers. It is hoping. The standard exists so that it can be checked: quarterly, lightly, by the manager's own manager, against the page. The number that comes out, the share of managers meeting the standard, belongs on the board scorecard next to attrition, because it predicts attrition.
It also changes how the next promotion is made. When the standard is visible, contributors can see what the job is before they want it, and some of them, sensibly, decide they do not.
The test
Pick your three newest managers. Can each of them tell you, without looking, what the standard says they own? If not, the problem is not them.