Promotion is usually treated as a reward for what someone has done. It is a decision about what they will do next, and about what will now stop being done at all.
Your strongest engineer becomes head of the engineering function. Twelve months later the function is slower, the individual is visibly unhappy, and the technical problems she used to solve are queued behind three other things. The organisation reads this as a development gap and books her onto a leadership programme.
It is a specification failure. Nobody wrote down what the role required before deciding who deserved it, so the decision was made on the only evidence available — performance in a different role, doing different work, for different reasons.
The pattern is common enough to be predictable, which means it is designable. The question that prevents it is not who is ready, but what this role demands its holder give up — and whether the person you are about to appoint will give it up.
The Strategic Context
Succession registers list names against roles, and the match is almost always made on performance in the current role, because that is the only durable record the enterprise holds. Everything else — what a person wants, what they would refuse — sits in the heads of one or two colleagues and rarely survives a reorganisation.
Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull gave the popular version of the consequence, in which people rise to the level at which they become ineffective [SOURCE DETAILS REQUIRED]. Their framing treats it as a ceiling of ability, which makes it look like a training problem. Ability is rarely the binding constraint at senior levels; what the person is prepared to give up is, and capability development does not change that.
The exposure is larger than one unhappy appointment. Every senior role filled on the wrong criterion consumes two scarce things at once: the capability of the person appointed, and the capability that has left the role they vacated.
What the Promotion Decision Is Actually Deciding
Two misreadings do most of the damage. The first is treating promotion as recognition rather than reassignment. Recognition is backward-looking and personal; reassignment is forward-looking and structural. Bundle the two and declining becomes an insult, while offering becomes the only way to say thank you — so the whole vocabulary for valuing people runs through a mechanism designed for something else.
The second is treating orientation as a competency. Competencies can be taught: financial literacy, contract structure, how to run a portfolio review. What a person will not give up cannot be taught, and attempts to teach it are experienced as an instruction to become someone else.
Reframing the Issue
Edgar H. Schein developed the concept of the career anchor: the element of a person's self-concept they would not surrender if forced to choose, expressed across a set of orientations including technical and functional mastery, general management, autonomy, security and stability, entrepreneurial creativity, dedication to a cause, pure challenge, and lifestyle [SOURCE DETAILS REQUIRED].
The framework is normally used as a self-assessment instrument, and that is where its value is usually left. Turn it around and it becomes a specification language for roles.
A role does not have an anchor. It has a demand, and the demand is stated most honestly as a sacrifice. General management demands the holder give up personal mastery. A custodial role in a regulated process demands they give up variety. A venture-building role demands they give up predictability of income and status. Written that way, the appointment question stops being "is this person good enough" and becomes "is this person willing" — which you can put to them directly.
What a Role Actually Requires
Start with the tension that produces most failures. The technical anchor is satisfied by getting better at something specific and applying it; its holder measures a good week by what they personally produced. The general management anchor is satisfied by integrating work across functions the holder cannot perform, and measures a good week by what the system produced. Both are legitimate. They are not adjacent, and progression between them is a change of trade rather than a change of level.
Promoting on technical excellence into general management therefore asks the person to give up the exact thing that made them worth promoting, and to accept that their competence is now assessed on the performance of people less capable than themselves in the discipline they know best. Some make that trade and thrive. Many discover they will not, and the discovery happens after the announcement, when reversal has become expensive.
The other orientations are equally specifiable, and specifying them prevents different failures. A role requiring security and stability — custodianship of a licence condition or a safety case — is badly served by an appointee who needs novelty, and there is nothing second-rate about the requirement. A role requiring autonomy cannot be created inside a governance regime that will not grant it.
The discipline here is to write the requirement before naming anyone. Once a name is in the room, the requirement bends to fit the person.
The Promotion That Costs Twice
A misdirected promotion is usually accounted for as one problem. It is three: the role the person now occupies badly, the role they left — typically backfilled by someone less capable, so the strongest function becomes merely adequate — and the one nobody costs, which is that the organisation has removed its most capable practitioner from practice, and the practice was why the function had standing.
That compounds in technical and engineering organisations, where credibility with customers, regulators and partners rests on the depth of a few people. Promote enough of them and the enterprise keeps its headcount while losing the capability that headcount was for.
The remedy is reversibility, engineered before the announcement. Appoint into demanding role changes on a defined term with a stated review point, name in writing the role the person returns to if the fit proves wrong, and say at the time of appointment that this is how the organisation does it. A return path agreed in advance is a design feature; one improvised afterwards is a demotion, and everyone reads it as one — which is why bad appointments stay in place for years.
None of this works unless someone is prepared to say, in the succession discussion, that a favoured candidate is not suited to the role in question. That is a hard sentence to say about a person who has done everything asked of them, and organisations vary enormously in whether it can be said at all [Related article: What Does Your Organisation Do When Someone Brings Bad News?].
A Technical Ladder That Is Real
The standard response is a dual ladder: a technical progression running parallel to the management one. Most are decorative, and the people they are designed to retain can tell within a month. Four tests separate a real ladder from a consolation.
Pay bands must overlap genuinely at equivalent levels, and visibly. Decision rights must bind: a principal engineer whose objection stops a release holds authority, while one who advises holds a title. Access must be structural — a seat in the forum where commitments are made. And movement must be observable in both directions. If nobody has ever moved from a management role onto the technical ladder without losing money or standing, the ladder does not exist, whatever the framework document says.
A measurement precondition sits underneath this. The succession register is populated from whatever the organisation records about people, and most workforce measurement records output in the current role and nothing about orientation or intent [Related article: How Many of Your Workforce Metrics Have Ever Changed a Decision?].
Would a Strong Candidate Reject Us?
Capable candidates evaluate employers on a consistent set of criteria: whether the business solves a problem customers pay for; whether revenue comes from customers or successive funding rounds; whether the manager is worth learning from; whether the role offered matches what they actually do; whether anyone can articulate what progression looks like; and what people who left say about why.
Inverted, that is a diagnostic an executive team can run on itself. Not "how do we attract talent", but: on which of these grounds would a strong candidate decline us, and would we know?
Two are within immediate control. Hiring someone into work outside their strength on an understanding that they will move internally later loses a good person twice — once when they underperform, and again when the promised move never comes because the business now depends on them where they are. And where nobody can describe what advancement requires, candidates conclude, usually correctly, that it is discretionary.
Compensation design carries the same specification logic. Substituting equity for cash to attract people below market rates transfers risk from the enterprise to the individual and selects for candidates who can absorb it, which correlates with existing wealth more reliably than with capability. It is also incompatible with a role requiring the security and stability anchor. Australian employee share scheme arrangements carry their own tax, valuation and disclosure treatment, and what is available to an unlisted business differs from a listed one [FACT CHECK REQUIRED]. This requires professional legal and tax verification — ERANORTH is not a law firm or a financial adviser, and no assumption should be made about what proportion of remuneration equity can represent.
One requirement of general management roles is rarely specified and often decisive: the holder must be willing to hold unresolved disagreement between capable people and adjudicate it. Candidates with a strong technical anchor often find this the least tolerable part of the job, and the organisation's own habits determine how much of it the role carries [Related article: Your Organisation Has a Default Conflict Style. Who Chose It?].
Decision Framework
Specify the role before naming the candidate: the orientation it requires and, more importantly, the sacrifice it demands.
| Orientation the role requires | What the holder must give up | Disqualifying signal in a candidate |
|---|---|---|
| Technical and functional mastery | Breadth of scope; positional authority | Wants headcount as the marker of progress |
| General management | Personal mastery; being the best practitioner | Describes success only in work done personally |
| Autonomy and independence | Structure, and shared decision rights | Needs the framework settled before starting |
| Security and stability | Novelty and rapid movement | Bored by custodial work; seeks the next thing |
| Entrepreneurial creativity | Predictable income and defined scope | Requires the plan approved before committing |
| Dedication to a cause | Market-rate compensation for the difficulty | Cannot state why this work matters to them |
| Pure challenge | Continuity; the problem ends and so does the role | Wants a permanent remit |
| Lifestyle predictability | Roles with unbounded escalation obligations | Nothing — the failure is designing the role dishonestly |
Two tests complete it. Ask the candidate what they will miss most about their current role, and listen for whether the answer is what the new role removes. And require a written reversibility clause — review date and named return role, agreed before the appointment is announced.
From Strategy to Execution
Immediately, take the roles carrying most enterprise risk and write the orientation and sacrifice for each before looking at any names. Where a role's requirement contradicts its design — balance promised alongside unbounded escalation, autonomy promised inside a regime that grants none — fix the design, not the advertisement.
Over the medium term, build the technical ladder properly or stop referring to one, and instrument the return path so that stepping back has a precedent. Add orientation to what the succession process records, gathered in conversation rather than inferred from performance data.
The long-term position is a change in what succession planning is. Most of it is a list of names against roles, refreshed annually, and it fails because the roles are treated as fixed and the people as substitutable. Succession as role design asks the prior question — what must this role demand of whoever holds it — and produces a different register: fewer surprises, more internal candidates told honestly what the job would cost them, and a technical capability that survives its own success.
Signals to Monitor
Watch the proportion of internal promotions that end in exit or reversal within two years, and whether anyone examines them. Watch how long vacated specialist roles stay open, which measures the depth you actually had. Watch whether any senior person has moved from management to a technical role without losing pay or standing. Watch whether candidates ever decline over the role rather than the money. And watch changes to Australian employee share scheme and remuneration disclosure requirements, which can alter the viability of an equity-weighted offer without any change in your strategy [FACT CHECK REQUIRED].
Questions for the Leadership Team
- For our five most critical roles, what does each demand its holder give up — and is that written anywhere a candidate could read it?
- When we last promoted a strong specialist into management, what happened to the technical work they were doing, and who does it now?
- Has anyone here ever moved from management onto a technical track without losing money or standing? If not, what does our dual ladder actually offer?
- On which of the criteria a capable candidate applies to us would we currently fail, and how would we find out?
- What would it take to reverse a senior appointment without the person treating it as a demotion — and have we ever built that in advance?
Closing Perspective
Every promotion decides two things: what a person will spend the next several years doing, and what will now stop being done, by them, at the standard only they could reach. Organisations deliberate carefully about the first and almost never state the second, which is why the cost of a misdirected promotion shows up in capability that quietly disappears rather than in the individual who struggles.
The instrument is not complicated. Write what the role demands before you write who deserves it, state the demand as a sacrifice rather than a list of responsibilities, and ask the candidate whether they will make it. That does not predict who will succeed. It produces a decision made with the candidate rather than about them — and a leadership team that can tell the difference between someone who has earned recognition and someone who wants the job.
About the author
Kevin Jogin is Founder & Principal Advisor at EraNorth. Meet the Founder.