Great at the work ≠ great at leading the work

There's a move that almost every agency makes at a certain point in their growth.

You've got someone crushing it in their role. Your best account manager. Your top designer. Your most reliable media buyer. They're producing more than anyone else on the team, clients love them, they've been loyal to you - and you want to reward them.

So you promote them.

The account manager becomes an account director. The designer becomes a creative director. The media buyer becomes the head of performance.

It feels right. They've earned it. They understand the work better than anyone. Who better to lead the team than the person who's been doing it best?

Six months later, profit is down. Team morale is shot. The person you promoted is overwhelmed, their former peers are frustrated, and you're quietly doing their job for them because things keep slipping through the cracks.

I've seen this play out more times than I can count.

The qualities that make someone excellent at doing the work - attention to detail, personal accountability, high standards, the ability to produce quality output consistently - are not the same qualities that make someone excellent at getting others to do the work.

In fact, sometimes they're opposites.

Your best individual contributor succeeds by controlling the work. By putting their hands on it. By making sure it meets their standards before it goes out the door.

A great manager succeeds by letting go of the work. By trusting others to do it. By coaching and developing people instead of fixing their output.

That's a completely different psychological orientation. And asking someone to flip from one to the other overnight - just because you gave them a new title - is setting them up to fail.

The other problem is subtler.

When you promote your best performer, you lose your best performer.

They're not doing the work anymore. They're supposed to be managing people who do the work. But nobody on the team is as good as they were - that's why they got promoted in the first place. So the quality drops.

And because they don't know how to develop others yet - because that's a skill they've never had to build - they can't bring the team up to their level. They just get frustrated that other people don't see what they see, don't care as much as they care, don't produce at the level they produced.

So they start doing the work themselves again. Staying late. Jumping in to fix things. Micromanaging because they can't trust the output.

Now you've got someone who's doing two jobs poorly instead of one job brilliantly.

What should you do instead?

If you're at the point where you need management - real management, not just a title - hire someone who's already done it.

Find someone who's managed at the level you're trying to reach. Someone who's led teams of the size you're building toward. Someone who already has the frameworks and instincts for developing people, holding them accountable, and producing results through others.

Pay them well. It's worth it.

If you want to keep your internal people in leadership - and sometimes you should, because they have context and relationships that an outsider doesn't - then hire a VP above them who can train them up. Give them a mentor who's been there before. Don't throw them into the deep end and hope they figure it out.

The middle management layer is the number one reason agencies can't scale profitably. Not because the people are bad - because they were promoted into roles they were never equipped for.

There's a model I use when thinking about whether someone is ready for more responsibility.

It comes down to two dimensions: skills and internal drive.

Skills: Do they have the actual capabilities required for the new role? Not the capabilities of their current role - the capabilities of the role you're considering them for. Managing people is a skill. Developing talent is a skill. Running meetings effectively, giving feedback, delegating work, holding people accountable - these are all skills. Has this person demonstrated them? Or are you just assuming they'll pick them up?

Internal drive: Are they motivated to do this specific job? Some people who are great individual contributors have no interest in managing others. They like doing the work. They don't want to spend their days in meetings and performance conversations. Promoting them isn't a reward - it's a punishment for being good at something they enjoyed.

If someone has high skills and high drive for the management role, you can delegate to them with confidence.

If they have high drive but low skills, you need to support them heavily while they build the capabilities.

If they have high skills but low drive, you need to understand why - maybe this isn't what they want.

If they have low skills and low drive for management, don't promote them. Find another way to reward their contribution.

But even if someone scores high on both - even if they have the skills and the drive - there's one final test before you hand them a team.

They need to clone themselves.

What I mean by that: before promoting someone to manager, have them take an underperformer or average performer and turn them into a high performer who works autonomously.

Not someone who was already good. Not someone who just needed a little polish. Someone who was struggling - and through their coaching, their feedback, their development - became someone who produces quality work without needing to be managed closely.

If they can do that once, they can do it again. They've proven they can develop people, not just do the work themselves.

If they can't - if every time they try to bring someone up, they end up just doing the work for them or getting frustrated and giving up - they're not ready. No matter how good their intentions are.

The person who's great at the work is rarely the person who's great at getting others to do the work.

Confusing the two costs agencies years of growth and hundreds of thousands in profit.

If you're struggling with middle management - if you've promoted people who aren't producing through their teams, or you're about to make a promotion decision and you're not sure - reply with "MANAGEMENT" and let's talk about it.

Nick