The Promotion Disaster and What You Can Learn From It

When Promoting Too Fast Makes Good People Worse

The Peter Principle states that people rise to their level of incompetence. In theory, every engineering leader knows this. In practice, we ignore it when promoting people we like.

Back in 2023, I promoted one of our most effective engineering managers to director level. They'd been crushing it as an EM—running their squad, mentoring junior developers, shipping features on time. When the opportunity came to promote them to the director role, it felt like a no-brainer.

Here's what I missed: being a great engineering manager and being an effective director require completely different skill sets. Having to set technical strategy, managing stakeholders while also balancing the needs of the business and the team were challenges they were not ready for.

However, as I would painfully learn over the course of the next year, this was just the beginning of my leadership mistakes.

What Actually Happened

Within three months, the cracks started showing. One-on-ones became awkward. Sprint planning turned into subtle power struggles. Senior engineers began scheduling "informal chats" with me—never directly complaining, but clearly frustrated.

The new director wasn't malicious. They just lacked the emotional intelligence and systems thinking that people management demands. They'd solve problems by writing code instead of empowering their team. They'd make unilateral technical decisions that affected other teams without consultation. Most damaging, they'd take credit for wins but deflect responsibility for failures.

Here's the thing I didn't see coming: the impact wasn't immediate or obvious. It was death by a thousand small cuts. People didn't quit dramatically—they just became less engaged, less willing to stretch, less excited about Monday mornings. The impact of this was festering under the surface, and it was only when I was forced to make a change that I realized the full extent of the damage.

My Coaching Mistake

Instead of addressing the problem directly, I doubled down on coaching. I convinced myself that with enough guidance, they'd grow into the role. I gave them books on management, I tried pairing them with external mentors, created "learning opportunities" that were really just attempts to fix what was broken.

I failed to recognize the size of the gap between their skills and what the role required. While coaching is a valuable tool and the right approach most of the time, it's not a silver bullet.

For six months, I kept thinking the next coaching conversation would be the breakthrough. In reality, I was teaching the team that poor performance at the leadership level was acceptable as long as someone was "trying to improve."

The Real Cost

By the time I made the hard decision to restructure the role, the damage was done. Not only was the team demoralized, but we'd also lost the confidence of other teams—and it only got worse from there.

Here's what really shocked me: this person wasn't just failing as a director. The pressure and stress of being in over their head had caused them to regress. They could no longer do the engineering management work they'd previously excelled at.

The same person who used to run smooth one-on-ones was now avoiding difficult conversations entirely. Sprint planning, which they'd once facilitated with confidence, became tense affairs where they'd either micromanage or completely check out. Their technical judgment, previously one of their strengths, became erratic as they second-guessed every decision.

It wasn't until I had to step in and start working closely with the team again that I saw how deep the issues ran. The director's inability to manage cross-team dependencies led to missed deadlines and increased friction with other departments. But something more insidious had happened: they'd started fostering a blame culture where mistakes were never acknowledged, and the team felt they had to cover up issues rather than learn from them.

This is the real danger of promoting someone beyond their readiness. It's not just that they can't perform at the higher level—the psychological pressure can actually damage their ability to do work they were previously good at. When someone loses confidence in their leadership, it cascades into every aspect of their performance.

By the end, I wasn't just dealing with a director who couldn't set technical strategy. I was dealing with someone who'd lost the basic management skills that had made them successful in the first place.

That's when I realized the true cost of my mistake. It wasn't just the direct reports who suffered—it was the signal I sent to the entire engineering organization about what leadership looked like and what we tolerated. And I'd taken someone who was genuinely talented and put them in a position where they couldn't succeed at any level.

What I Learned About Leadership Readiness

The experience taught me to evaluate leadership potential differently. Technical skill is table stakes, but it's not predictive of management success. Now I look for three things:

• Pattern Recognition Under Pressure: Can they identify recurring problems and address root causes, not just symptoms? Do they see how their decisions affect other teams and stakeholders?

• Emotional Intelligence in Conflict: How do they handle disagreement? Do they seek to understand before being understood? Can they have hard conversations without making them personal?

• Systems Thinking Over Hero Solutions: Do they look for ways to make the team more effective, or do they just work harder themselves? Do they create leverage or dependencies?

I also learned that promoting too early is worse than not promoting at all. A strong IC who feels undervalued might leave—but a failed leader destroys team morale for months.

What I'd Do Differently

If I faced the same situation today, I'd handle it in three ways:

• Define Leadership Readiness Explicitly: Before anyone asks for promotion, we discuss what leadership success looks like, what skills need development, and what evidence would demonstrate readiness.

• Create Leadership Opportunities Without Titles: Let people practice management through project ownership, mentoring, and cross-team collaboration before giving them formal authority.

• Act on Problems Faster: Set a 90-day checkpoint for any new leadership role. If there are consistent team friction or communication issues, address them immediately rather than hoping coaching will solve them.

The reality is that most engineering leadership failures are predictable if you know what to look for. We just get so focused on rewarding good people that we forget good people can still be wrong for the role.

The Question You Should Ask

Before your next promotion decision, ask yourself: "What would have to be true about this person's leadership style for their team to be more effective six months from now?"

If you can't answer that question specifically, you're probably not ready to promote them yet.

Let's connect if you've navigated similar leadership transitions—I'd love to hear what you learned from the decisions that didn't go according to plan.