You promote one of your best people. They know the business, they are good at what they do,
and people respect them.
When a management position comes up, they seem like the obvious choice.
They are avoiding difficult conversations. Delegation is not going particularly well.
They may still be doing too much of their old job while trying to manage everyone else’s.
It is easy to start wondering whether you have promoted the wrong person.
What did you assume they would know how to do?
Promotion does not automatically create preparation
Being good at a job and managing other people doing that job require different things.
You can know your role inside out without having practised difficult feedback.
You can be organised without knowing how to manage someone who works differently from you.
You can be confident in your own decisions and still struggle to help somebody else make theirs.
None of that means somebody cannot become a very good manager.
It does mean the business needs to recognise that management is a skill, not just a new title.
Sometimes we treat what someone was good at before the promotion as proof that they will
know what to do afterwards.
This is not necessarily about sending every new manager on a course before they are allowed
near a team. It is about recognising that there is something to learn.
If nobody acknowledges that, a new manager can spend the first few months trying to work out
what management is supposed to look like while everyone around them assumes they already know.
Then, when things do not go smoothly, we judge what happens next.
When does a development gap become a performance problem?
This is the part I find particularly interesting.
A few months pass and perhaps things are not going particularly well.
The manager may not be delegating enough. They may be avoiding a difficult conversation.
They may keep coming back to their own manager for reassurance.
Maybe they are still doing most of their previous role because that is where they feel useful and confident.
At that point, the conversation can quickly become about performance.
Why are they not stepping up?
Why can they not deal with this?
Why do they keep asking me?
What support did they have when their role changed?
What did they understand their responsibilities to be?
What did everyone else understand?
What were they expected to learn?
Not every assumption needs challenging. In business, many assumptions are sensible and necessary.
But when somebody is not doing what you expected them to do, it can be useful to look at
the expectation as well as the person.
If you are growing a business, developing managers or trying to understand why responsibility
is not landing as expected, it may be worth looking at the assumptions sitting underneath it.
If this is something you would like to talk through, please get in touch.
We would be happy to help you explore what is happening and what might need to change.