Written by Michiel R. De Boer
He had been the best salesperson the company had produced in a decade. Not by a narrow margin, by a considerable one. His pipeline management was exceptional. His client relationships were the envy of the team. He closed deals that other people had given up on. He had an instinct for the work that was, in the most literal sense, difficult to teach.
So when the regional sales director retired, the decision felt obvious. He had earned it. He had demonstrated, over eight years, the highest level of capability the role required. The team respected him. The senior leadership admired him. Promoting him felt like the logical conclusion of an obvious trajectory.
Fourteen months later, he asked to step down.
The team he had taken over (stable, moderately performing, with several strong individuals) had experienced a 30 percent turnover in the time he had been in post. Two of the highest performers had resigned. A third was on performance improvement. Morale, which had been unremarkable and functional, was now a genuine concern. The clients he had personally owned were fine; he had kept those relationships. The team’s other clients were showing signs of neglect.
He had not failed for lack of effort or commitment. He had given everything. He had managed the way the only successful manager he had ever known managed: himself. He had applied his individual success strategy: his perfectionism, his instinct for the work, his intolerance for effort that fell short of his own standard, to the management of people who were not him and did not work the way he worked.
And it had been, quietly and relentlessly, destructive.
The Promotion Trap
Laurence J. Peter identified the pattern in 1969 and named it with precision: in a hierarchical organisation, people tend to be promoted on the basis of their performance in their current role, and that promotion continues until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent. The Peter Principle has been validated empirically multiple times since its articulation, most recently by a 2019 study published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, which examined the promotion and performance data of more than 53,000 salespeople across 214 firms and found that the best individual sales performers were indeed significantly more likely to be promoted to management, and significantly more likely to perform poorly as managers relative to the managers around them.
The logic is structural, not personal. Individual performance and leadership capability draw on different competencies. Individual performance draws on mastery of a specific domain: technical skill, client insight, creative judgment, whatever the core work requires. Leadership draws on something genuinely different: the ability to create conditions in which other people can do their best work. To develop capability in others. To communicate in ways that motivate rather than direct. To manage not the work but the people doing the work.
These are not extensions of each other. A person who is exceptionally good at the work is not, by virtue of that excellence, better positioned to develop it in others than someone of moderate capability who has strong interpersonal intelligence and genuine curiosity about what makes people perform. In fact, in several specific ways, high individual performers are at a systematic disadvantage in leadership roles.
Why Excellence Creates Specific Leadership Liabilities
High individual performers in a domain share a set of characteristics that make them excellent at the work and systematically problematic as managers of others doing that work.
High standards that are not yet transferable. The expert has internalised standards that are difficult to articulate because they were built through years of practice and pattern recognition. When they observe someone’s work and find it inadequate, they can see what is wrong: but they often cannot explain it in a way that the other person can learn from. The feedback comes out as judgment rather than instruction: “This isn’t quite right” without the scaffolding that would make it developmental. The person receiving it does not improve; they feel inadequate.
Intolerance for the developmental curve. The expert has forgotten what it was like not to know what they know. This is not arrogance. It is a recognised cognitive trap: sometimes called the “curse of knowledge.” The expert processes complex situations quickly and seemingly effortlessly. Watching a less experienced person process the same situation slowly and with visible effort is not just inefficient; it produces genuine discomfort. The expert reaches in and fixes the problem rather than coaching through it, because fixing is faster and less painful. In doing so, they deny the person the development opportunity and add the task to their own workload.
Identity invested in the doing, not the enabling. Perhaps most fundamentally, the high individual performer’s sense of professional identity is bound up in their personal excellence. The move to leadership requires a profound identity shift: from “the person who produces excellent work” to “the person who enables others to produce excellent work.” For many people, this shift is not completed, or is not completed quickly enough. The leader who is still at heart an individual contributor will gravitate toward the work itself, solve problems that the team should be solving, and take on the most interesting challenges personally rather than distributing them. The team learns that the most stimulating work flows up to the leader, and they receive the remainder.
Performance standard calibrated to the outlier. The high performer measures their team against the standard they themselves set as an individual contributor. This standard is, by definition, exceptional: the exception rather than the rule. A team managed against an exceptional standard that is not appropriately supported or developed will fail to meet it, repeatedly, and the cumulative effect on motivation and confidence is significant.
What The Team Experiences
From the team’s perspective, the arrival of a promoted star performer as manager typically follows a recognisable arc.
Initial excitement, or at least confidence: this person is excellent, they will know what good looks like, we can learn from them.
Then, fairly quickly, a different experience. The feedback is evaluative rather than developmental. The bar is high but its standards are not fully explicable. The most interesting work flows upward. The leader’s involvement in day-to-day tasks signals, however unintentionally, a lack of confidence in the team’s capability. Team members who had been operating with reasonable autonomy find themselves increasingly directed, monitored, or corrected.
The most capable people on the team, those with the most options and the most acute sensitivity to motivational conditions, begin to feel the conditions that Piece 3 of this series described: an eroding sense of autonomy, a feedback environment that produces anxiety more than growth, a question about whether their own development is being invested in or extracted from.
They begin to consider their alternatives.
The less capable members of the team, lacking the cover of high performance, begin to experience the uncomfortable clarity of an unforgiving standard. The performance management process, in many of these cases, becomes a mechanism of attrition rather than development.
Meanwhile, the leader is working harder than they have ever worked, doing more than they have ever done, genuinely trying to perform at a standard they understand, and watching results deteriorate despite the effort. Which confirms their hypothesis that the problem is the team, rather than inviting the more useful hypothesis that the problem is the approach.
The Organisational Failure That Precedes The Personal Failure
It is worth saying clearly: the individual who fails in this scenario is not the primary locus of the failure. The organisation that placed them there without preparation is.
Gallup’s research on first-time managers finds that only 10 percent of people have the natural talent for management, defined as the ability to engage, inspire, and develop others effectively. The rest can become good managers, but only with deliberate development, sustained support, and time. Most first-time manager promotion processes provide almost none of these things.
The typical pattern: excellent individual contributor is promoted, given a title, perhaps a brief induction, and then expected to manage. The assumption is that the transition is primarily structural: you now have a team reporting to you, rather than something fundamentally developmental. The identity shift, the skill acquisition, the entirely new body of knowledge required to develop people well. These are presumed to occur naturally as a function of experience in the role.
They do not. Not reliably. And certainly not quickly enough to protect the team from the transitional period.
More fundamentally, organisations rarely examine whether the person wants to manage, genuinely wants to, not just wants the status and compensation that management brings. Wanting a leadership title and wanting to spend the majority of your working hours on the development, motivation, and performance management of other people are two very different things. Many excellent individual contributors, if given a real choice, would prefer a senior individual contributor role with commensurate compensation and status. That choice, in most organisations, does not exist.
Practical Recommendations
Treat the first-time manager transition as a major developmental programme, not a structural change. The research on this is clear: the quality of first-time manager development is one of the highest-value investments an organisation can make. It should include: a period of structured coaching before the first team meeting; ongoing facilitated peer learning with other new managers; a clear conceptual shift in how success is defined (from personal output to team output); and specific skill development in the areas where individual performers most reliably struggle: giving developmental feedback, building autonomy in others, and managing performance with compassion rather than judgment.
Build a credible individual contributor track. The promotion trap largely disappears in organisations where exceptional individual contributors have a pathway to senior, well-compensated roles that do not require them to manage people. This is not a concession. It is a rational allocation of talent. An exceptional individual contributor in a senior role produces more value there than a struggling people manager produces in a management role. Build the track, make it genuinely equivalent in status and compensation, and give people a real choice.
Assess leadership orientation before promoting, not just performance. A 360-degree assessment, a genuine developmental conversation about what the person wants and what they believe makes a good manager, a structured look at how they have informally developed others in their current role: these are basic tools that are under-used in promotion decisions. The question “would this person be good at developing other people?” is rarely asked directly. It should be the primary question.
Pair the new manager with a coach. Not a buddy, not a mentor from the same function, but a skilled coach who can help them navigate the identity transition, develop the specific capabilities they lack, and process the experiences of the first year without those experiences calcifying into a management style built on misapplied individual success strategies.
Create explicit performance standards for management as distinct from delivery. The manager who is excellent at delivery and destructive to team engagement will pass most performance reviews, because most performance reviews are built around delivery metrics. Build management performance standards: team retention, team engagement, capability development within the team, quality of feedback conversations, and make them real, weighted, and consequential.
The Real Cost Of Getting This Wrong
The case study I opened with, the sales director who asked to step down, was, in the end, a story with three victims. The team members who left, whose careers were disrupted and whose confidence was damaged by an experience of being managed against an impossible standard. The leader himself, who suffered a professional and personal blow that took years to recover from. And the organisation, which lost a world-class individual contributor to a management role that was wrong for him, and which received a damaged team in return.
All three outcomes were predictable. None of them were inevitable.
Individual excellence does not transfer automatically to leadership. This is not a failure of the individual. It is a feature of what leadership actually is: a different craft from individual performance, requiring a different orientation, different skills, and a different relationship to the work. An organisation that fails to honour this distinction, that continues to promote its best people into management without preparation, support, or genuine alternatives, will produce the same story, in variations, indefinitely.
The pattern repeats because the structural conditions that produce it are never addressed.
Addressing them is not complicated. It is a decision.
The Question Worth Sitting With
Think about the last significant promotion decision your organisation made.
Was the primary question “is this person excellent at what they currently do?” Or was it “is this person likely to be excellent at developing other people?”
Those two questions produce different answers more often than organisations acknowledge. The second is the one that determines what happens to the team.
This is Piece 5 of an eleven-part series exploring the patterns behind organisational dysfunction: and what the GITO® Approach reveals about addressing them at the system level.
The next piece moves from the leadership layer to the team: The team that is highly collaborative but never makes a decision: harmony as a trap, and what lies beneath it.
