Beyond Performance: Identifying Leadership Potential
You Were Promoted Because You Were Good at Your Job. That Is Exactly the Problem.
The announcement is made, congratulations are offered and an employee becomes the organization’s newest supervisor. The promotion is deserved. That person has worked hard, developed technical expertise and proved capable in a demanding position.
Then the employee returns to work, and the definition of success changes almost overnight.
Before the promotion, success was largely measured by individual performance. After it, success depends increasingly on what other people can accomplish. The new supervisor must set expectations, make decisions with incomplete information, address poor performance, manage conflict and earn the trust of employees who may have been peers only a day earlier. Technical ability still matters, but it is no longer enough.
Organizations routinely promote people because they are good at their jobs and then place them in positions requiring a different set of abilities. A police officer becomes a sergeant. A nurse becomes a department manager. A mechanic becomes a maintenance supervisor. A pilot becomes a chief pilot. A salesperson becomes a sales manager. In each case, the qualities that earned the opportunity may not be the qualities the new role will test most severely.
That is the problem I have watched throughout nearly two decades in law enforcement, and it is one I now ask MBA students at Ashland University to consider. Promotion changes more than a title. It changes the work, the relationships and the way success is measured. Yet organizations often invest far more in deciding who is eligible for promotion than in preparing that person for what comes next.
The Job Changes Before the Person Is Ready
Written promotional examinations can serve an important purpose. They create a competitive process and measure whether candidates understand policies, procedures and technical material. I am not arguing that organizations should abandon them. I am arguing that we should be honest about what they can and cannot tell us.
A test can measure what a candidate knows. It cannot fully show how that person will respond when a trusted employee begins to struggle, when two members of the team are in conflict or when the organization’s direction is unclear. It cannot tell us whether employees will bring bad news to that supervisor before a problem becomes a crisis. It cannot develop the judgment required to give difficult feedback without humiliating someone or to hold a person accountable without losing sight of that person’s potential.
In promotional systems I have observed, examination performance and professional experience are not always closely connected. A person with limited operational or leadership experience may study diligently, score exceptionally well and earn a promotion. That accomplishment is legitimate, but the score does not remove the experience gap. Too often, the newly promoted supervisor is expected to close that gap while already carrying the responsibilities, burdens and consequences of leadership.
The organization has answered one question: Who earned the position? It may not have answered another: What experiences will this person need to succeed in it?
Leadership preparation should begin before the promotion. Aspiring supervisors need opportunities to coordinate teams, teach others, resolve disagreements, communicate expectations and receive honest feedback about how they affect the people around them. After promotion, that development should continue through mentoring, observation and meaningful support. Selection and preparation are related, but they are not the same process.
Authority Is Granted. Trust Is Earned.
Leadership author Simon Sinek offers a useful way to think about this problem. In a presentation about performance and trust, he describes a lesson he learned from members of the Navy SEALs. Organizations typically know how to identify high performers because performance can be measured through scores, production, technical proficiency and results. Trust is harder to quantify. According to Sinek, that imbalance can cause organizations to elevate technically strong employees who weaken the people around them while overlooking trusted employees who help the entire team perform better.
His observation closely mirrors what I have seen in promotional systems. A written examination produces a score that can be ranked and defended. Trust does not fit as neatly on a list. Yet research examining four decades of leadership studies has found that trust in leadership is meaningfully connected to important employee and organizational outcomes, with trust in an immediate supervisor being especially significant (Dirks & Ferrin, 2002). The quality may be difficult to measure, but that does not make it less important.
Some of my most valuable lessons about leadership came not from a formal program, but from watching people operate under demanding conditions.
One of my most valuable leadership experiences came while working under a sergeant affectionately known as “Heavy C.” He had a strong personality, and people rarely seemed neutral about him. Some loved him; others did not. But among the officers working directly with him, he earned something more useful than universal approval: trust.
Heavy C. formally commanded the unit, but I often served as a communication link between him and the officers. He would explain the operational direction, and I helped translate it into the practical information the team needed. Communication also moved upward. Officers brought equipment needs, concerns and developing problems to me, and I carried those issues back to him.
That arrangement worked because trust existed in every direction. Heavy C. trusted me to communicate accurately with the officers. The officers trusted me to represent their concerns honestly. I trusted him to listen and respond. The officers did not always receive the answer they wanted, but they knew their concerns had reached the person responsible for making the decision.
Heavy C.’s strength was not that he personally controlled every conversation or possessed every answer. He created enough trust for important information to reach the right people. He also recognized that informal leadership could support formal command rather than threaten it.
That distinction matters in every organization. The person with the title is not always the person employees approach first. Informal leaders are often the people coworkers consult when circumstances become uncertain, when a process stops working or when the official message does not answer the practical question. Wise managers identify those relationships and work with them. Insecure managers sometimes try to suppress them.
A promotion can grant the authority to assign work, approve decisions and enforce expectations. It cannot compel employees to speak honestly, share concerns early or give their best effort. Those behaviors depend on credibility, consistency and how the supervisor treats people when the situation is difficult.
Responsibility Must Be Supported, Not Merely Assigned
Trust is not the only requirement. Organizations must also align responsibility with the authority and support needed to produce results.
One of my greatest professional frustrations came from carrying substantial responsibility without corresponding authority. In one assignment, I helped manage nearly $2 million in equipment and inventory. If something was missing, damaged, improperly documented or unavailable when needed, I was expected to answer for it. Yet I lacked the formal authority to change many of the processes and decisions affecting those outcomes or to require others to follow corrective procedures.
The lesson was straightforward: accountability works only when people have a reasonable ability to influence the results for which they are being held responsible. Assigning responsibility without providing sufficient authority creates frustration and eventually paralysis. The employee remains accountable for the outcome but must depend on decisions made elsewhere to achieve it.
The same mismatch can follow a promotion. An organization may give a new supervisor responsibility for morale, performance, staffing or operational results while limiting that person’s access to information, discretion, training or support. When the results disappoint, the organization may blame the individual without examining the system surrounding the role.
The opposite mismatch is dangerous as well. Giving someone authority before preparing that person to carry its consequences places the burden of that learning curve on the team. Employees experience every unclear expectation, avoided conversation, inconsistent decision and preventable mistake while the supervisor learns through trial and error.
Effective leadership development must therefore address both sides of the position. New leaders need the judgment to use authority responsibly, and they need enough authority to meet the responsibilities the organization assigns them.
Preparing for a Different Kind of Success
My MBA studies gave me language and management frameworks for patterns I had already witnessed in practice. My professional experience, in turn, gives those frameworks weight when I teach. Many MBA students enter the classroom with substantial technical knowledge and credibility in their fields. They are capable, ambitious and ready for greater responsibility. But their next opportunity may demand more than an advanced version of what they already do well.
That is why organizations should examine leadership potential before a vacancy must be filled. Who already earns the confidence of coworkers? Who can explain a difficult decision without hiding behind a title? Who accepts feedback, develops others and remains steady when circumstances become uncertain? Those behaviors do not guarantee success, but they reveal more about readiness than technical performance alone.
Potential leaders should be asking questions too. Have I learned to measure success through the development of other people? Can I address poor performance directly and fairly? Will people trust me enough to tell me what I need to hear rather than what they think I want to hear? Am I seeking the title, or am I preparing for the work that begins after I receive it?
Before making the next promotion, an organization should look beyond whether a candidate has earned the opportunity. It should consider what leadership experiences that person has already had, what relationships the person has built and what preparation will continue after the announcement is made. It should also ensure that the new supervisor’s responsibility is matched with enough authority and organizational support to influence the outcome.
Being good at a job may earn someone the opportunity to lead. It does not complete the transition. A promotion may place someone in charge, but what happens next determines whether that person becomes a leader.
Wesley Hurley, MBA, is an adjunct professor at Ashland University's College of Business and Economics and currently teaches MBA courses in business information systems, entrepreneurship and small business management.