The Pitfalls of Promoting Skilled Individuals to Management Without Leadership Training
It’s a common scenario across many companies - an employee excels at their individual job, demonstrating impressive skills and knowledge. When a management role opens up, they get promoted to lead a team or department based on their subject matter expertise.
While strong domain expertise is an advantage, developing great managers requires much more. Without proper leadership training and support, promoting subject matter experts into management often sets them up to struggle.
Relying solely on an employee’s past individual job performance fails to account for the very different skillset effective management requires. Challenges promoted experts-turned-managers frequently face include:
Lacking “people skills” like emotional intelligence.
Communication
Nurturing talent
Micromanaging instead of delegating
Unable to trust others
Inability to motivate or influence others without formal authority
Failing to think strategically beyond daily tasks
Getting frustrated with team members not as competent in the subject matter
Unclear on legal standards
HR protocols
Feeling isolated and overwhelmed without mentorship
The knee-jerk reaction is then to remove them from the management role. But often, the employee was eager for the opportunity. They simply weren’t set up for success with training and support.
The better solution is to train skilled individuals on leadership competencies before promotion and provide ongoing management mentorship. This allows you to leverage their abilities while developing their people-focused capabilities. They can truly thrive and maximize their impact.
Creating engaged, empowered, conscious leaders in your business is what is going to enable them to exceed in their position and lead others in the business to do the same. Here at The Ethical Coaching Company, we work with businesses to support their people to progress with confidence and empower them to become the great leaders they have the potential to be. If you want to learn more about that, book a call with us today.
*This blog post was written by a human with the creative assistance of AI