Promote to Find Leaders, Not as a Reward

Sometimes the most exceptional workers are not meant to move into management positions.

Being great at doing the work doesn’t necessarily translate into being great at leading workers, Derek Brown, lead web developer and manager at LinkedIn, writes in a recent post on LinkedIn.

“One of the major mistakes I see in both startups and established companies is moving their talented contributors to management simply because they are talented contributors,” Brown writes.

He outlines the following problems that using management as a promotion can cause:

• Effective management requires a different skill set than contributing.
• You lose a phenomenal contributor while gaining a mediocre manager.
• Other contributors will feel the brunt of your career ladder's shortcomings.
• It builds a culture of contributors as second-class citizens to management.

Read Brown’s possible solutions on his original post “Management is Not a Promotion” on LinkedIn.