Excellent Employees / Staying

Managers are selected for the wrong thing

The best practitioner is not automatically the best manager.

The standard promotion path takes the strongest individual contributor and makes them responsible for a team. The skills involved barely overlap: one is doing the work well, the other is enabling other people to do it, giving feedback, making decisions about people, and absorbing pressure rather than transmitting it.

The organisation loses twice when this goes wrong. It loses its best practitioner from the work, and it acquires a manager who is unhappy and whose team turns over. Both costs are real and neither appears anywhere as a consequence of the promotion decision.

The structural fix is a genuine senior practitioner track with comparable pay and status, so that progression does not require becoming a manager. Many organisations claim one and few make it real, and the tell is whether anybody senior is actually on it.

The other fix is support. New managers are typically given the role and no preparation, and then criticised for handling it badly. The specific skills that matter most, giving difficult feedback and making decisions about people, are learnable and are almost never taught before they are needed.

There is a further use for the probation conversation, which is capturing what the recruitment process got wrong. A new starter can say precisely which parts of the advertisement and the interview were misleading, and that information is available for a short period before they absorb the organisation's own view of itself.