This is the second installment in my series exploring common managerial missteps that demoralize teams and drive top talent away.
One of the less frequently discussed errors a company can make is promoting people to management roles too soon. The scenario is familiar: a bright, young, ambitious, and talented person enters the organization and begins a rapid ascent. They quickly earn a spot in the inner circle, catching the eye of management. When circumstances align, be it a resignation, company expansion, or another timely opening, they are viewed as the obvious candidate. The result is a person with minimal experience placed in a significant management position.
This isn’t just a recipe for long term problems for the company, it can cause serious problems to that person’s own career in the long run.
The problems with promoting people too soon are many, some obvious and some subtle.
The first issue is that at the lower, worker levels of a career, you are mostly dealing with your own work. You may have impossible deadlines or other external problems, but you are really only responsible for your own work and your own issues.
Ambition, hard work, and intelligence combined with some good luck can make a person a good team leader. But it won’t, and can’t, prepare the person for higher levels of management. A good manager gets that way in part through experience. Experiencing when things fall apart, experiencing working with difficult people, difficult bosses, difficult problems. Inheriting issues that aren’t your fault, but are now your responsibility.
Many years ago I was a freshly promoted IT Director in a very large company, and the CIO told me something that stuck with me; “From here on out, your job is to deal with problems. Every day you are going to be dealing with the things that are going wrong. The people that report to you can handle the things that are going right, your job is to deal with the things that are going wrong.”
If the first issue with rapid promotions is the switch from being responsible for your own work to solving other people’s problems, then the second issue is a lack of empathy and humility.
I have never met a person that was promoted rapidly to middle to upper management positions that didn’t over estimate their own role in getting there. Yes, it usually does take hard work and both hard and soft skills. But it also takes the luck of being in the right place at the right time, and of avoiding stepping on those landmines that nobody could have seen coming but took out their peers instead.
A final issue with overnight successes is that they know they don’t really know how to do their job, so they end up becoming yes men to their boss, the person that promoted them. Instead of being a trusted assistant to whom responsibility can be delegated, they are stuck in a role where they do little more than echo their boss; they become mouthpieces and do grunt work, but they’re not learning how to lead themselves.
A lot of the people with meteoric careers in their 20s end up stagnating in their 30s and beyond, because of the arrogance that such quick and seemingly easy success can breed. Lacking the experience and emotional toughness to process a never ending series of issues, as well as the people skills and perception to be a good leader and mentor, they stagnate. Often they start job hopping. Either they have a good enough resume that they can land a job at another company, but they don’t have the skill set to thrive anywhere, or they end up stuck at the original company, knowing consciously or not that they aren’t really competitive with the people that earned their positions through much more work and the lessons that came with it.
Now what?
What if you have promoted someone very quickly? Then you need to put in extra effort to genuinely mentor them. Not telling them what to do, but helping them learn the lessons they should have learned before you promoted them. Give them real responsibility. Let them fail a little, and help them bail themselves out. Teach them empathy, and make them accountable for it.
And what if you are one of those people with the meteoric rise? Start with being honest with yourself. How did you get where you are? Take pride in your part, but practice a little humility and look around you for the people that are also hard workers, but who ended up in the wrong department, or didn’t get assigned that career making project, or who just didn’t click with senior management like you did. Ask yourself what kind of a director/AVP/VP you are. Are you trusted to really do the work yourself, or are you really just muscle for your boss? If you are, then start working to do more than act as an echo chamber.
