Promoting a top performer into leadership without losing both

Promoting your strongest performer into management feels like the obvious reward and the safe choice. They know the work, the customers and the team, and they have earned it. Yet the promotion puts two things at risk at once: the work they were best at, and the results of the team they now lead. Both can suffer while they learn the new job and still try to do the old one.

Whether this is a top account executive becoming a sales manager or a senior consultant taking over a delivery team, the steps that protect the work and the person are mostly decided before the announcement. This post covers how to judge whether the person is ready to manage, how to define the new role, and how to hand it over so that you stop running the team and they stop doing their old job.

DisclosureJake Jorgovan co-founded Alpha Apex Group, which this essay links to.

The best performer is not always the best candidate for manager

The habit of promoting the best individual performer has been studied. In a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in 2018, the researchers Alan Benson, Danielle Li and Kelly Shue examined sales workers at 214 firms (opens in a new tab). They found evidence consistent with firms favoring current job performance in promotion decisions over other characteristics that better predicted how someone would do as a manager. They also estimated that the cost of promoting people with lower managerial potential was high. The authors offered two explanations: firms may be making poor promotion decisions, or the motivation that promotions give the rest of the sales force may be worth the cost.

NBER's summary of the study (opens in a new tab) gives the detail. The researchers observed more than 1,500 employees promoted into management. A doubling of a new manager's sales before promotion was associated with a 7.5% decline in the sales performance of each of their subordinates. On average, salespeople with experience of working in teams produced better results as managers than those who had worked alone. The research covered sales roles in manufacturing, information technology and professional services, so it measures one kind of job. The question it raises is still worth asking of any promotion.

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In the sales-worker sample summarized by NBER, stronger sales records were associated with more promotions but lower subsequent manager value added. Manager value added measures changes in subordinates’ sales performance. These associations are not a universal rule about every top performer.nber.org (opens in a new tab)

Start by asking whether the person wants to manage. Explain that the job becomes responsibility for other people's work, and which parts of their current job they would hand over. Then look at what their record says about managing. Have they trained a colleague, run a project through other people or covered for a manager? How did the people around them do? A top performer with none of that experience may still be the right choice, but you are then promoting on potential, and the role needs more support from the start. If you decide not to promote them, decide how their results will still be rewarded, because the rest of the team is watching what strong performance earns.

Leading a team is a different job from doing the work

Delegation is asking someone to do a task, getting it back and judging whether it was done well. Leadership starts when someone oversees a department or a team and owns it: when a problem comes up, they are the one who has to solve it. I drew that line in a 2022 episode on leading others and letting go, and the difference matters most when you promote from within.

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Jake’s historical account, summarized from this article. These results describe his experience and are not a performance forecast.

I also described the usual path I saw in most small companies. The best doer becomes the manager; hiring a manager in from outside was less common. That creates two people who have to let go. The person who promoted them has to hand over real ownership, and the newly promoted manager has to let go of their own work and learn to lead others.

The second half is easy to miss. In a 2020 episode on bottlenecks, I said founders often tell themselves that no one else can do a piece of work as well as they can. The bottleneck, I said, often sits in the work they are good at, not only in the work they dislike. I was talking about founders, but a newly promoted manager is in the same position. The work they are best at is the work they will be most tempted to keep.

Write the new role down as if you were hiring for it

One easy mistake I described in that 2022 episode is promoting someone and simply telling them they are now responsible for all of it. I raised it while we were promoting one of our best podcast managers to oversee the whole production team. Without a definition, people end up half doing the work and half managing it, and they start doing a poor job of everything. My advice was to give them a job description and to write it the way you would write a job posting for a new hire.

Then put success in one sentence, and repeat it until it becomes a filter for everything the person does in the role. For our podcast managers, success was every episode published on time and without errors. For the people scheduling guests, it was a standing backlog of guests booked for every one of our podcasts. Use that definition to check whether their work serves the role's purpose.

Two more decisions belong in the same document. The first is what the person stops doing, and who takes it on. If a top account executive becomes sales manager, decide who inherits their accounts and their share of the target before the announcement. If nobody does, the old work quietly stays with them, and the half-and-half problem starts on day one. The second is how you will judge the new role: the measures you will review together each week, and what you expect them to own by the time the handover is complete.

Set the date, then stay out of the work

Advice I got from my adviser at the time, Anthony Tombolio, was to "set the date and rip the bandaid." Pick a date after which the role is theirs. Before it, they can shadow and learn. After it, you keep supporting them through one-on-ones and questions, but they are responsible.

When I was building our guest scheduling team, there were a couple of months of shadowing, and then the moment of wondering whether they were really ready. We set the date anyway and kept weekly check-ins and metrics. From that point, the problems were theirs to figure out.

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Jake’s historical account, summarized from this article. These results describe his experience and are not a performance forecast.

Don't hop back in to do a little of the work because the new person does not seem ready. As I put it in that episode, it wrecks their confidence, and it means you have not let go. The same applies to the promoted manager and their old work. Agree which parts they hand over, to whom and by when, and review it in your one-on-ones like any other measure.

When the new manager brings you a problem, resist solving it. I suggested asking what they would recommend doing instead. Often their answer is close to what you would have said, and saying it themselves builds their confidence. When it is not, you correct them a little and it becomes a coaching moment. At the time, I held one-on-ones with people while I developed them into leadership roles: weekly for the most senior, monthly for those further removed.

If the brief shows that no one inside has the experience the role needs, that is useful to know before the announcement, not after. You can promote on potential with more support, or bring in a manager from outside and use the same brief to recruit them. For a senior appointment, what to define before hiring a senior leader covers the brief in more depth.

Before you announce the promotion:

1. Confirm that the person wants to manage, and look at their experience of working through others.
2. Write the new role down, with one sentence of success and the measures you will review.
3. Assign the work they are leaving and set the handover date.
4. Agree your one-on-ones and when to escalate, then let them make their own decisions.

Who will do their old work the week after they start managing, and how will you know the new role is working? If the answer to either is unclear, write it down first.