Why High Performers Struggle as Managers
In many organisations, promotion is still treated as the most natural expression of recognition. Employees who consistently perform well, produce strong outputs, and demonstrate reliability are often seen as obvious candidates for advancement. This logic appears reasonable on the surface: if an individual has mastered their current role, then progression into management seems like both an appropriate reward and a sensible next step. Yet, this longstanding organisational assumption deserves far more scrutiny than it usually receives.
The movement from high performance in an individual contributor role to effectiveness in management is not nearly as seamless as many organisations presume. In fact, the difficulties that often emerge after promotion suggest that the issue is not simply whether capable people are being identified, but whether organisations fully understand the nature of the role into which those people are being promoted.
At the heart of the problem is a conceptual misunderstanding of what management actually is. Strong individual performance is typically rooted in technical competence, task execution, reliability, and domain-specific expertise. Management, however, requires something fundamentally different. It is less concerned with personal output than with the coordination, development, and alignment of others' work. The transition, therefore, involves more than an increase in responsibility; it entails a qualitative shift in role identity.
Operational qualities that previously made a person successful may have limited relevance to what is now required of them in a managerial position. Schleu et al. (2024), in their synthesis of 55 years of research, found little evidence that high individual performance consistently predicts leadership effectiveness. This is a significant finding because it challenges one of the most widely accepted assumptions behind performance-based promotion systems. If excellence in one role does not reliably translate into effectiveness in another, then the criteria used to identify future managers may be fundamentally misaligned with the demands of management itself.
Pause, and think about it.
This misalignment becomes clearer when the nature of the managerial transition is considered more carefully. Many organisations still frame promotion as a progression upward, as though management is merely a more advanced version of the role that preceded it. In practice, however, it is often a transition into a different kind of work altogether. Robertson (2020), in research on first-time managers, highlights that the movement from managing oneself to managing others is accompanied by role ambiguity, heightened pressure, and a substantial shift in professional identity. This is important because it reminds us that new managers are not simply learning additional tasks: they are attempting to adapt to a new logic of work. They must begin to think in terms of systems rather than isolated tasks, team capability rather than personal contribution, and collective outcomes rather than individual achievements. Where organisations fail to recognise this shift, they create the conditions for strain long before any apparent underperformance emerges.
One of the more troubling aspects of this pattern is that the early signs of strain are often mistaken for individual grit. Newly promoted managers frequently remain highly involved, responsive, and operationally present. They continue to solve problems directly, intervene in tasks, and maintain an output level that reflects the habits that made them successful in the first place.
From an organisational perspective, this can appear reassuring, as it suggests the individual is coping well with increased responsibility. Yet this surface-level performance often conceals a deeper structural problem: when managers continue to operate primarily as high-performing individual contributors, they seldom create the space required for strategic thinking, people development, or sustainable team coordination. Their responsiveness may mask overload. Their visibility may conceal role confusion. Their apparent competence may, in fact, reflect an attempt to compensate for a role that has not been clearly designed or properly supported.
This distinction between performance and coping is particularly important. In many organisations, managers are not given genuinely redesigned roles when they are promoted. Instead, they inherit additional responsibilities while being implicitly expected to maintain previous levels of output, oftentimes without being trained to do so. The result is that they occupy two positions at once: they are still expected to deliver as specialists while also leading as managers. Under such conditions, it is unsurprising that many default to the role dimension they know best. They continue doing the work, often because it feels more concrete, more measurable, and more immediately rewarding than the slower, less visible work of enabling others. Over time, however, this creates a series of predictable organisational consequences: Teams become overly dependent on the manager, development within the team slows, delegation becomes inconsistent, and the manager gradually becomes a bottleneck rather than a multiplier of performance.
What may initially appear to be a capability issue is often better understood as an organisational design failure.
This is where the discussion begins to extend beyond the individual and into broader systemic territory. When organisations observe that a previously high-performing employee is struggling in management, the explanation is often personalised. Questions are raised about leadership readiness, confidence, temperament, or interpersonal skills. And, while such factors are not irrelevant, they can distract from the more significant structural issue. The problem is rarely that the individual has suddenly become incapable. Rather, the organisation has relied on a weak model of promotion, one that assumes continuity between two fundamentally different kinds of work.
The enduring appeal of the Peter Principle reflects this tension. Although often discussed informally, the principle captures a real pattern within hierarchical systems: people are promoted based on success in one role until they reach a position that requires a different set of competencies. Pluchino, Rapisarda, and Garofalo (2018) revisit this logic in computational form, reinforcing the idea that promotion systems rooted solely in past performance may produce inefficiency rather than effectiveness.
The organisational costs of this are substantial, even when they are not immediately visible.
At the team level, misaligned promotion practices can produce inconsistent leadership, reduced developmental support, and variable team performance.
At the organisational level, they contribute to hidden inefficiencies in workflow, communication, and accountability.
When managers are not enabled to manage well, work tends to flow through personalities rather than systems. Decisions depend too heavily on individual availability, and outcomes become uneven across teams because management effectiveness is determined less by design than by the personal coping strategies of whoever occupies the role. These patterns become even more pronounced in remote or distributed environments, where unclear structures and weak management design are harder to conceal.
Maley (2024) argues that in rapidly changing environments, traditional performance and management systems are increasingly insufficient. This observation is especially relevant in contemporary work settings, where distributed teams require far greater intentionality around role clarity, accountability, and coordination. Remote work did not create the weaknesses in these systems, but it has made them more difficult to ignore. And the way organisations solve this problem is what matters in the long run!
A more useful way to approach the issue is therefore to question the assumptions embedded in promotion itself. Promotion is often framed as a recognition of excellence, but management should not be treated merely as a reward for high performance. It is a different organisational function, one with its own behavioural demands, relational responsibilities, and structural requirements. This suggests that organisations should ask different questions when identifying future managers. Instead of asking who has performed best in the current role, they should ask what the managerial role actually requires and whether the candidate is both suited and supported for that type of work (or whether appointing another manager is even necessary to begin with: let’s not ignore the fact that all employees want to be promoted, however, if an organisation does not have senior-level capacity it should not be promoting based on demand rather than actual need). This also requires a more serious effort to define managerial effectiveness in observable terms. Without clear behavioural expectations, organisations are left evaluating managers through vague impressions, inherited assumptions, or short-term team outcomes that may tell only part of the story.
Emerging discussions on management further reinforce the importance of this shift. The value of managers increasingly lies not in direct oversight or technical superiority, but in their ability to create the conditions under which others can perform well. This includes aligning people to roles effectively, facilitating clarity, enabling good decisions, and supporting sustainable performance rather than simply driving output. Seen from this perspective, management is less about authority and more about organisational architecture at the team level. It involves shaping environments in which capability can emerge, rather than substituting one’s own capability for the team's collective capacity. This reframing is particularly important in organisations that want to move beyond reactive leadership models and develop more intentional, resilient people systems.
What follows from all of this is not the conclusion that high performers should never be promoted, nor that technical excellence is irrelevant. Rather, promotion systems need to be designed with greater conceptual precision. If management is treated as a distinct role rather than a natural extension of individual achievement, then organisations must support the transition accordingly. This means clarifying expectations, redesigning workloads, identifying managerial capability more deliberately, and recognising that strong individuals cannot indefinitely compensate for weak systems.
Leadership development, in this sense, is not simply a matter of training people after promotion. It begins much earlier, in how the organisation defines roles, distributes work, and interprets excellence.
What becomes particularly important in this context is how organisations respond once this pattern has already taken hold. In many cases, individuals have already been promoted into roles that were never clearly defined or adequately supported. The instinct is often to correct this through training or performance management, but these interventions tend to focus on the individual rather than on the structure within which they operate.
A more effective response begins with acknowledging the nature of the role itself. When management is layered onto existing responsibilities, there is often a need to revisit how work is distributed, what is realistically expected, and how success is defined. This may involve creating clearer boundaries between execution and oversight, redistributing operational work, or introducing more structured mechanisms for decision-making and team development. In practice, it is less about ‘fixing’ the manager and more about reducing the structural tension they are expected to absorb.
In the end, the difficulties that high performers experience when they move into management are not best understood as isolated personal failures. They reflect a deeper organisational contradiction. Many organisations reward one kind of contribution and then require another, without adequately acknowledging the difference between the two. In doing so, they create systems in which promotion appears logical on paper but becomes destabilising in practice. A more thoughtful approach to organisational design would recognise that effective management is not the automatic outcome of past success. It is a separate form of work, requiring different capacities, clearer structures, and a more deliberate understanding of what performance actually means at different levels of the organisation. Until that distinction is taken seriously, the pattern will continue to repeat itself: capable people/people with long tenure will be promoted into roles that have not been properly designed for success, and organisations will continue to misread structural problems as individual shortcomings.
Sources:
Maley, J. F. (2024). Performance management in a rapidly changing world. Human Resource Management International Digest.
Minni, V. (2025). New research on how the best managers shape employees’ careers. Harvard Business Review.
Robertson, K. (2020). Factors influencing the successful transition from managing self to managing others. University of Pretoria.
Schleu, J. E., et al. (2024). High performers = better leaders? Evidence from 55 years of research. Journal of Business and Psychology.
Pluchino, A., Rapisarda, A., & Garofalo, C. (2018). The Peter Principle revisited: A computational study. Physica A.