ME · 5 min read
Promoted for the Wrong Reasons
The skills that make someone the best individual contributor are rarely the skills that make them a good leader — and nobody tells them.
Most organizations promote the person who is best at the work. It is the most defensible decision available: the results are visible, the track record is documented, and the team already respects them.
Then the job changes entirely, and the support does not.
Doing and leading are different jobs
Individual contribution rewards speed, personal standards, and control of your own output. Leadership rewards patience, shared standards, and the deliberate release of control.
A new leader who keeps optimizing for the first set of behaviors will look busy and feel effective while their team quietly stops growing.
The signal to watch
The clearest early warning is not a missed deadline. It is a leader whose team keeps escalating decisions they are perfectly capable of making.
That pattern almost never means the team is weak. It means ownership was never actually transferred — only the task was.
What to do about it
Name one decision you currently make that someone on your team should own outright. Give them the authority, the constraints, and the budget in the same conversation.
Then hold yourself to the harder part: let their version stand, even when yours would have been faster.
Go deeper
Leadership Readiness Assessment™
How prepared are you to lead people, not just do the work?
See the assessment