Randy Polito has watched it happen dozens of times: the best performer gets promoted to leader. They were excellent at their job, so the company assumes they'll be excellent at leading people.
It doesn't work that way.
There's a fundamental mistake companies make. They confuse competence with leadership. Being great at your job and being great at leading people are two different skill sets. Promoting someone for task mastery into a role that requires people management is a recipe for failure on both ends.
Look at professional sports. You rarely see the star athlete become the star coach. The Hall of Fame coaches—the ones who actually won—were usually role players. They had to develop a much wider array of skills. They couldn't rely on talent alone. They had to learn how to communicate, how to motivate, how to manage different personalities, how to see what others couldn't see.
But in most organizations, we just move the best performer upstairs into an office.
Now you've got two problems: a frustrated manager who's out of their depth, and an empty spot where your best person used to be. The new person doesn't have the institutional knowledge. The work suffers. The manager is stressed trying to do a job they were never equipped for. And your best talent is sitting in a meeting wondering why they're not doing the work they actually loved.
That's not advancement. That's strategic self-sabotage.
There's another problem buried in here: we promote people for being agreeable, not for being honest.
Randy Polito has seen it everywhere. The people who get ahead are the ones who go along. The ones who nod in meetings. The ones who don't rock the boat. But organizations don't need more people saying yes. They need people willing to say "that's a bad idea, here's why, and here's the data."
Valid, data-driven disagreement should be considered and encouraged. But instead, the person who voices it—the squeaky wheel—often gets held back. Regardless of their skills. Regardless of their talent. Because they're "difficult." Because they won't just agree.
That's a massive loss. You're penalizing the people who could actually fix things.
Here's what Randy Polito believes: Task mastery and leadership aren't interchangeable. Promote people for the right reasons—their ability to lead and develop others—not just because they were good at their last job. And create space for honest voices, even when they disagree. Especially when they disagree.
The best organizations don't promote their best workers into management. They invest in making them even better at what they do. Conference attendance. Better tools. A seat at the table when you're designing the next version of your work.
Let the person doing the work help you do the work better.
The alternative is watching your best people leave and wondering why you can't retain talent.
— Randy Polito