The Most Disturbing 5 Mistakes Leaders Make When Promoting People (And How to Prevent Them)

Evgeniy Shvets/Stocksy

1. Thinking That Technical Skills Equal Managerial Skills

Often, leaders complain that they’ve promoted one of their best employees but soon feel disappointed with their ability to lead people. What do leaders do? They blame the employee instead of owning their mistake.

This is the most disturbing error among leaders: assuming that strong technical expertise or outstanding job performance alone qualifies an employee for promotion. Yet, when things go wrong, instead of acknowledging their own mistake, they often blame the employee.

The Peter Principle is the tendency in most organizations, especially large ones, to continue promoting employees until they reach a level of incompetence. In other words, an engineer who’s good at coding may be promoted to team manager even though they’re not ready to lead people.

According to the principle introduced by Dr. Laurence J. Pete, every position could eventually be filled with incompetent people.

Research confirms the notion tha…