You Promoted Your Best Technician and Called It Development - The SPRIITE Series/Article 7 of 9

I promoted a very good technician into a supervisor role at a company I was running. He was the best in the group at the work, he was respected, and the promotion was obvious to everybody including him.

Eleven months later I was having a hard conversation with him about his performance. He had not been managing his people. He had been doing their difficult work himself, at night, and covering for them in the morning, because that was the only version of helping he knew how to do. His team was frustrated with him and he was exhausted.

What had I given him for the new job? A title, a raise, and a conversation about how proud we were. Not one hour of preparation for the actual work of managing people, which has almost nothing in common with the work he had been excellent at. I had taken my best technician, put him in a job he had never been shown how to do, and eleven months later I had a performance problem I had personally manufactured.

Training means prepared for the job they have now

The sixth of the seven conditions is narrower than it sounds. Training is whether people have been prepared for the job they are doing today, as opposed to the job they were hired into, or the job they held three roles ago.

Most companies do a reasonable job on entry-level technical onboarding, and then stop. The result is that the further someone advances, the less prepared the company makes them for their actual work, which is exactly backward from where the consequences are.

There is a version of this that shows up in an assessment as a two even in companies that spend real money on training. They buy technical certifications, they pay for licenses to stay current, they hold an annual safety session, and none of that touches the thing their people are actually failing at, which is usually running a team, having a hard conversation, or reading a number.

The three gaps that show up most

The promotion gap is the biggest and the most common. A company promotes its strongest individual contributor into a role requiring completely different skills, gives no preparation, and then treats the predictable result as a personal failing. This is so routine that most managers I have worked with in small and midsize companies learned to manage by trial and error on live people.

The financial fluency gap is the second. Managers are asked to run a part of a business without ever having been taught what moves profit and cash. There are seven financial levers, a different seven from the seven conditions in this series: price, volume, cost of goods, operating expense, receivables, payables, and inventory. Most leadership teams below the CEO can name two of them, which is why every proposal that reaches the owner is some version of sell more or spend less. I made that case at length in Seven Levers Move Profit and Cash.

It is a training gap, and one of the highest-return ones to close.

The hard conversation gap is the third and the most avoided. Nobody is naturally good at telling a colleague their work is not acceptable. It is a learnable skill and almost nobody is taught it, so managers avoid it, problems compound quietly, and the eventual conversation is far worse than the early one would have been.

Training does not mean coursework

The word makes owners think about budget and classrooms, and that is usually the wrong shape for a company under a hundred people.

What works in the companies I have watched do this well is smaller than a program. A new manager gets an experienced one to sit with weekly for their first six months. Managers read the same financial report together until everyone can explain the movement in their own part of it. The owner runs the difficult conversation as a role play before a manager has to have it for real. Somebody demonstrates the thing, watches the person do it, and gives them the correction.

That is training, it costs mostly time, and for these particular gaps it works better than most of what gets purchased. Formal instruction has its place and some skills genuinely need a classroom or a certification. The reason companies reach for a course first is that a course is easier to schedule than sustained attention.

Scoring training honestly

A two looks like this. People were trained when they arrived and rarely since. Newly promoted managers received a title and no preparation. Nobody can describe what a person in a given seat is supposed to be able to do.

A four looks like this. Every promotion comes with a stated plan for how the person gets ready. Managers get regular structured time with someone more experienced. The company can name what capability each key seat requires and can say where each person stands against it.

The question I would ask first, if you only ask one: name the last three people you promoted and describe what you gave each of them besides the title. If the answer is a raise and encouragement, you have found the condition to work on this year.

The supervisor in the opening story deserved better than I gave him, and it took me too long to see that the problem was mine. If you have a manager who is struggling, look at what preparation they were handed before you conclude anything about their capability. And if you want help building something practical for your newer leaders, my door is open.