Why a strong specialist becomes a weak manager

I see the same story quite often.

There is a strong employee. They know the product better than anyone, solve hard problems faster than others, and can be relied upon. The manager thinks: "Who else would I promote, if not them?"

They get promoted.

And a few months later it turns out that the excellent specialist has somehow not become a strong manager.

Promotion is not a reward

It seems to me that companies often make one fundamental mistake here: we treat promotion as a reward for professionalism. Yet managing people is a completely different profession.

Yesterday a person's result depended mostly on themselves. Today their result depends on five, ten, twenty other people.

Yesterday they could say: "Give it here, I'll do it faster myself." Today that is one of the most dangerous phrases a manager can utter.

The department's best specialist instead of its manager

So the former strong specialist keeps living by the old model. Fixes the team's mistakes personally. Makes most decisions personally. Jumps into every difficult task personally. Checks every detail, because "it's safer that way".

As a result the team gradually stops thinking, while the manager works until late at night and sincerely believes they were simply handed weak people.

Yet the problem may not be the people at all.

They are simply continuing to be the department's best specialist instead of becoming its manager.

The other extreme

There is another extreme. A person gets the position and decides that their job is now to "be the boss". Rigidity, distance and step-by-step control appear. Where there used to be colleagues, there are suddenly "subordinates".

But a title by itself does not grant managerial maturity.

What has to be learned

A manager has to learn things that may never have been required of them as a specialist: setting clear tasks, delegating and not taking the work back, giving unpleasant feedback, developing people, resolving conflicts, making unpopular decisions, answering for other people's mistakes without looking for someone to blame.

And the hardest thing, in my view, is to stop measuring your own value by the number of tasks you personally did better than anyone else.

Because a manager has a different result.

If the team stops without them, that is not always a sign of how indispensable they are. Sometimes it is a sign that the system around them never came into being.

That is why I am not very close to the logic of "they are the best employee, so the next step must be a management role".

It must not.

Not every specialist needs to become a manager

There are excellent experts who have no interest in managing people at all. And a company gains nothing when it first loses a great specialist and then gets an unhappy manager.

And if a person genuinely wants to move into management, I would not stop at a promotion and a new job title.

They need to be taught how to be a manager.

And, perhaps even more importantly, given time to rebuild their own thinking: my result is no longer how well I work. My result is how well the team works without me having to carry it on my shoulders all the time.

I think this is exactly where the real transition from specialist to manager happens.

Have you met brilliant specialists whom a promotion ultimately made weaker?