Promoting High Performers Into Leadership Can Break Your Best Team
- Jun 20
- 5 min read
Updated: Jul 3
For years, John had been told that his hours were the proof of his commitment. His clients trusted him because he never let a deal drop, never let a crisis sit overnight, never said no to a Saturday call. The company praised him publicly for it. Anyone who's worked in sales knows the type, the wee powerhouse who'll outwork the whole office and never ask for the credit. By the time John was offered the regional sales manager role, he had spent a decade building a professional identity around one idea: he was the person who did whatever it took, alone, and won.
That promotion was meant to be the reward. Within two months, it had cost the business its three most profitable sales veterans, all gone within weeks of each other.
This matters because John's story is not really about a manager who lost his temper. It is about what happens when an organisation rewards a particular kind of strength for years, then hands that same person a role that requires an entirely different one, without ever checking whether he had it.
What was actually happening
On paper, the diagnosis looks simple: John demanded 80-hour weeks from a team that worked 40 to 50, he punished anyone who asked for a weekend off, and his three best performers eventually left rather than continue working for him. It would be easy to write him off as a bully who got what he deserved.
That is not what I see when I look at cases like this. Hogan Assessments describes this pattern as a form of leadership derailment, where the very traits that drive someone's early success become the traits that undermine them once the role changes. John was not a different person once he became a manager. He was the same person, applying the same formula, in a context where that formula no longer worked.
As an individual contributor, John's currency was personal execution. More hours genuinely did equal more results, because the only variable in the equation was his own effort. As a leader, the equation changed completely. His results now depended on other people's judgement, motivation, and capacity, none of which he could simply will into existence by working harder himself. He did not know this, because nobody had ever told him, and the skill that got him promoted gave him no preparation for the skill the new role actually required.
Why Promoting High Performers Into Leadership Happens So Often
One pattern I regularly see in the workplace is organisations promoting on the basis of output, then being surprised when the same person cannot manage people. It is an understandable mistake. Sales numbers are visible, measurable, and easy to reward. Leadership capability is none of those things until it is missing, and by then the damage is usually already done.
What often surprises people is that John was not the villain of this situation so much as a casualty of it. He had been explicitly and consistently rewarded for hyper-independence. The business praised him for fixing problems single-handedly, for solo miracles delivered under pressure, for never asking for help. His sense of professional worth became entirely tied to being the one who did the work, not the one who enabled others to do it. When he was promoted, nobody addressed that identity. He was simply given more people to manage and the same yardstick to measure himself against.
That is why he could not see his team's 40-to-50-hour weeks as normal. To John, anything less than total personal sacrifice looked like a lack of ambition, because total personal sacrifice was the only definition of commitment he had ever been taught to value. He was not lacking empathy in some abstract sense. He was applying the only operating model he had, to a job that required a different one entirely.
What this looked like in practice
Rather than building his team's capability, John applied pressure. He used public metrics to shame underperformance, scheduled late-night meetings that bled into personal time, and made it clear that requests to disconnect at the weekend were not welcome. Within two months, the environment he created was actively toxic. His three most profitable veterans, the people the business could least afford to lose, resigned within weeks of one another.
This is the hidden cost that rarely shows up in the immediate aftermath of a promotion. The business did not just lose three salespeople. It lost the institutional knowledge, client relationships, and credibility those three people carried, and it now has a regional manager who is likely to be remembered internally as the reason good people left, regardless of whether anyone ever properly diagnosed what actually happened to him.
What organisations frequently misunderstand
Organisations frequently overlook the fact that promotion is not a reward, it is a role change, and the two require completely different things from a person. One of the biggest mistakes I see organisations make is assuming that someone who is excellent at the job will be excellent at managing other people doing the job. Those are not the same skill, and treating them as interchangeable is one of the most expensive and avoidable errors in workplace performance.
A pattern that comes up repeatedly in my work with leaders across different sectors is the moment someone realises, often months into a struggling leadership role, that the thing that made them exceptional individually is now working against them. That moment is uncomfortable, but it is also the beginning of real progress, because it forces a more honest question: not "how do I get my team to work like I do," but "what does my team actually need from me now, and is that different from what I have always given."
In John's case, that question was never asked, by him or by the organisation that promoted him. He was left to apply his old formula to a new problem and to discover, in the most painful and visible way possible, that it did not work.
What effective organisations do differently
The organisations that get this right do not stop rewarding high performers. They simply stop assuming that performance and leadership readiness are the same thing. Before a promotion happens, there is real value in understanding how someone is genuinely wired to work, where their strengths create value as an individual, and whether those same patterns will translate or actively work against them once they are responsible for other people.
This is not a soft consideration. It has a direct commercial cost. A regional manager who burns through three veteran performers in two months represents a significant, measurable loss in revenue, client continuity, and team morale, on top of whatever it costs to manage the fallout and eventually replace him if the pattern cannot be corrected.
The professionals who make the strongest progress, in my experience, are the ones who get support before the crisis, not after. Leadership readiness is something that can be assessed and developed before a promotion is made final, not discovered through trial and error at the team's expense.
What this means for you
If you recognise something of John in your own leadership, the question worth sitting with is not whether you work hard enough. You almost certainly do. The question is whether the way you measure commitment in yourself is the same way you are asking your team to measure it in themselves, and whether that comparison is fair to either of you.
If you are the organisation watching a high performer struggle in a new leadership role, the question is whether you promoted someone because they were ready to lead, or because they had earned it through results that had nothing to do with leading at all.
Either way, the cost of getting this wrong is rarely contained to one person. It tends to show up, quietly and then suddenly, in the people who decide they would rather leave than keep working inside it.
By Paula Donnan
Strength-Led Career Consultant
Strength at Work | Better judgement. Stronger leadership. Higher performance.
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