Why Your Rockstar Employee is a Toxic Manager
The Peter Principle postulates that employees get promoted to their “levels of incompetence” — meaning they ascend in an organization based on success in current roles rather than having the actual skills their new senior role demands. This phenomenon plagued companies far before defined by Laurence J. Peter.
We’ve all witnessed the havoc wreaked by promoting talented individual contributors into management without requisite training or temperaments aligned for people leadership. Yet organizations keep prematurely plucking high performers to take on team oversight because their technical talents impressed.
This mistake intelligence or standout independent work for the vastly different team-building skills. Outstanding engineers, journalists, consultants, and creatives often thrive based on their focus, drive, and domain expertise. Management forced upon them because “it’s the next step up” shockingly backfires.
The Underdeveloped Management Muscles
Why does this happen over and over? Because human-centric disciplines like emotional intelligence, communication norms, empathy, relationship-building, and influencing receive little focus in individual contributor tracks. We praise technical competence but downplay orchestrating talents.
Without intentional development, managers-by-default struggle to adapt. Their bandwidth shrinks facing a torrent of people problems foreign from their trained expertise. Organizations waste this talent lacking infrastructure for nurturing management capabilities early on and defaulting to promotions as rewards.
The High Costs of Poor People Management
Study after study chronicles the detrimental impacts of unskilled people leadership from plummeting productivity to health epidemics. Environments with toxic, unsupportive management make employees sicker.
Lack of people leadership skills also drives unnecessary turnover costs. After all, people don’t quit jobs; they quit bad bosses. Gallup found over 50% of workers left roles specifically because of their managers — amounting to $7 trillion in annual lost productivity in the US.
Flipping the Script on Management Assumptions
So how can organizations solve the influx of incompetent management dragging down culture and performance? Stop assuming management is an automatic promotion from individual work. Treat these disciplines as vastly distinct requiring customized development paths.
Create official manager trainee programs allowing high potentials to sample responsibilities with guidance rather than trial by fire. Offer management transition coaching when promotions do happen to set struggling leaders up for human-centric skill-building success.
Most importantly, normalize that exceptional individual work does not guarantee effective management capacity. Measure leadership benchmarks separately from technical ability. And underscore through compensation and rewards outstanding people leadership in action.
In doing so, we could curtail enormous productivity losses and cultural corrosion from incorrectly placing employees in oversight roles they need more preparation to excel within. Incompetent management is overwhelmingly created by organizational negligence; it’s time to support our future leaders and change status quo assumptions.
Thoughts? What other solutions could improve management readiness across organizations?
