I recorded a voice note for you

I recorded a voice note on a walk this morning.

Sending it to you the way it came out.

Okay so, uh, this is just a thing I've been thinking about because, like, yesterday I had a call with - I won't say who - but a guy running an Meta ads agency, doing well, like seven figures, and he's about to promote his best account manager to be Head of Accounts. Or whatever the title's going to be. Head of Client Services. Something like that.

And, and look, I'm watching him talk himself into it on the call. He's listing all the reasons it makes sense. She's been there four years, she gets the clients, the team likes her, she's been picking up extra responsibility on her own already, you know, all the right reasons on paper.

And I'm sitting there going, oh no.

Because - and I've seen this like a hundred times, more than that - whoever is the best account manager? Almost guaranteed to be a worse Head of Accounts than, than literally the average account manager would be. Which sounds insane when I say it out loud, I know. But it's, it's not insane if you've been doing this long enough. It just, it sounds controversial the first time you hear it, so nobody says it, so nobody learns it, so everybody keeps making the same mistake.

So let me try to walk through what I told him.

Whatever makes somebody great at their work, that's not what makes them good at managing other people. Those are, they're almost opposite. Or, okay, not opposite. They pull in different directions. Because if you care a lot about getting the work right, when somebody else screws it up, what do you do? You just do it yourself. Right? Anybody senior at an agency listening to this has done that, like, a thousand times. You know exactly what I'm talking about.

So what happens is - you promote the great IC, right, and they just, they keep doing the work.

Except now they've also got like five direct reports they're supposed to be managing on top of it. So what do they do? They do the work, because that's what they're great at. And the five direct reports? They don't get managed. Because the manager's still down in the weeds doing the work. And then six months in, the team's worse, profit's most likely worse, the manager's burnt out crying in their car or whatever, and you the founder are doing parts of their old job for them.

You cannot for the life of you figure out what the hell happened.

What happened is, you promoted on the wrong person.

The right test, the right test isn't, "are they the best IC." It's, can they, can they clone themselves. Can they take somebody on the team who's average, kind of just doing the job, and turn that person into a high performer who can run on their own. Can they replicate themselves through another human being. That's the real test.

if they cant do that they are not a manager, they are an individual contributor

Doesn't matter how good they are at the work. Like, it really doesn't matter.

The work is one skill, managing is a completely different skill.

The same person being amazing at both is, like, vanishingly rare.

Um, so - okay so the take-home for him on the call was, before you promote them, do like a six-month trial. Just one. Give them one underperformer on the team and let them develop that person. Six months, that's it. And if at the end of the six months that underperformer is running on their own and performing well, cool - you've got yourself a manager, promote them. And if not? Then what you've got is a great account manager who would've made a bad Head of Accounts. And you've saved yourself from a really painful, expensive, six-to-twelve-month mess.

That's the memo. Heading back.

End of transcript.

There's probably a longer-form version of this I'll write at some point, there's a lot underneath about why agency middle management is so consistently broken.

But the short version is above.

If you've got a "best performer" on your team who you've been thinking about promoting, run the clone test before you make the move.

Nick

P.S.

If you're already mid-mess on a promotion that shouldn't have happened, we can start to untangle it together on an audit call.

Book in with me here →