Why your best engineer isn’t always your best manager

The Promotion That Made Sense at the Time

Someone on your team is brilliant. They’re reliable, they get results, clients love them, and they’ve been with you long enough to know the business inside out. When a management role opened up, promoting them felt obvious. They’d earned it. It was the right thing to do.

But something isn’t working.

They’re frustrated. Their team isn’t performing the way you expected. And now you’ve got a problem you didn’t have before — and you’ve lost the best individual contributor you had.

It’s not an unusual story. It plays out in businesses of every size, in every sector, every day. And it’s entirely avoidable.