Yaniv Preiss

It is sad and true: usually, people don’t leave companies; they leave managers. When the wrong person is transitioned into leadership, the blast radius is substantial.

The Cost of a Misfit

When a transition fails, the impact is three-fold:

1. The team: Gallup has shown that 70% of employee engagement is directly influenced by the manager. A bad fit leads to lower quality, failure to meet goals, delayed and wrong decisions, managerial bottleneck, stifled growth and attrition.
2. The manager: the wrong person in the role suffers from a heavy mental burden, low self-image, and anxiety about how they are perceived. This can lead to years of professional trauma.
3. The organization: when upper management places and keeps an ill-fitted person in a leadership role, trust erodes. It invites gossip, creates interpretations of company values, and damages the credibility of those who made the staffing decision.

Organizations that ignore a bad managerial fit face a slow decay of culture. Ignoring means being carelessly unaware of the situation or accepting it by not providing feedback and coaching.

Feedback and coaching might fail, and then fixing the problem could mean transition back to IC, demotion or PIP. Those are painful, but keeping the wrong person in place is a deliberate choice to accept low performance and let your best talent leave.

The Peter Principle

A 2018 study confirmed the Peter Principle: people in a hierarchy tend to rise to a level of respective incompetence – employees are often promoted based on their performance in their current role until they reach a level of incompetence, where they remain.

The fundamental error is viewing management as a “promotion” for a job well done. It isn’t. Management is a new profession. Transitioning a brilliant engineer to a team lead is not a step up, but a career change.

4 Major Transition Errors

Managers make these 4 major mistakes when transitioning an employee to management, causing their best employee to become their worst manager.

1. Transitioning based solely on technical skill: you lose a great technical contributor and gain a bad manager. Technical skills are easy to measure. Soft skills like empathy, influence, and emotional regulation are harder to quantify but are the foundation of leadership, and can be learned.
2. Lack of preparation: one generic workshop is not a transition plan. Without identifying individual gaps, providing continuous feedback and a deep dive into personal behavior change, the new manager is set up to fail.
3. Transitioning to solve a crisis: scaling companies often transition quickly to fill seats. This “quick fix” results in high turnover later when those managers fail to support their teams.
4. Undefined roles: if the role’s responsibilities and boundaries (disciplinary vs. matrix, single site vs. multiple, cultural expectations, or scope) are blurry, it is impossible to find the right fit.

Identify True Potential

Identifying a future leader requires looking past their narrow tasks and observing their impact on the ecosystem, as the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. When it comes to external candidates, you can rely only on the interviews, but for internal ones, you can look for evidence of the desired behaviors. Some come naturally, and some are teachable and practiceable before the transition. For other gaps, you may decide you can live with or create a plan to close them.

Social Intelligence

• Influence – people follow them, love to work with, listen to
• Initiative – new ideas, pushing them through completion
• Communications (written and verbal) – clear, concise, understandable, respectful
• Relationship – authentically create and maintain connections without flattery
• Emotional intelligence – sensitivity to other people, containing opposing views
• Productive behavior in conflict, focusing on the topic rather than the person, setting boundaries rather than shutting down
• Ability to have uncomfortable conversations
• Mentoring and teaching others
• They authentically celebrate the wins of their teammates

Business Acumen

• Systemic view, not only the narrow task – impact on members, other teams, customers, partners, short vs. long term
• Strategic thinking – long-term, business impact
• Ability to decide under ambiguity
• They can explain the company’s vision and how their work supports it

Personal Character

• Intrinsic motivation, evidently enjoy what they do
• Curiosity, investigation, will to learn and grow, also outside their immediate job description
• Belief in the vision, the team, themselves, having backbone
• Reliability, operating for the org, not for themselves
• Seeking additional responsibility without being asked
• Humility – ability to get along with others, support others, collaborate
• They match the company’s DNA, core values, vision

Manager Tools recommends following the “150% rule” – they have some proven experience, meaning actually doing parts of what the role demands, as in “did 100% of their current role and 50% of the next one.”

Choosing the Right Person

To find the right fit, you must move beyond the standard interview.

Before anything else, create clarity about the role, responsibilities, interfaces with others, and success criteria.

1. Succession planning and internal sourcing: always inform the company of open roles and ask current managers about their succession plans (make sure they know succession planning is part of their job). Interestingly, certain teams sometimes act as “leadership incubators” – find out why and whether it’s reproducible.

2. Collect feedback about the person from team and stakeholders.

3. Behavioral interview: don’t ask “what would you do?” Ask “what did you do?”

• “Give me an example of an initiative you led and its impact.”
• “Tell me about a time you received negative feedback. What changed?”
• “How did you deal with an objection to your idea?“
• “Describe a failure and what it taught you.”

Make sure to check for their motivation, and ask how they see the manager’s role (emphasis on directs, customers, partners, stakeholders). If their motivation is not to make an impact, but rather title, salary, power and status, they are not likely to do a great job and challenges might bring them down quickly.

4. 360-degree: for highly influential roles, gather extensive feedback from stakeholders and peers. Examine their “horizontal” work, how they interact with other teams, not just their “vertical” output to their boss.

Summary

Transitioning a top performer into leadership is not a promotion. It is a career pivot into a new profession. When organizations treat management as a reward for technical excellence rather than a specific set of emotional and systemic skills, they risk a catastrophic blast radius that disengages teams and traumatizes the new manager. To break the cycle of the Peter Principle, leaders must stop hiring for past technical output and start identifying true potential: the ability to navigate ambiguity, handle uncomfortable conversations, and prioritize the organization’s ecosystem over personal gains. Getting this transition right isn’t just about filling a seat, but about ensuring results and retention of your best talent.