Sara Sweat, MA
In a fast-growing startup, it’s easy to promote the person who’s reliable, fast, trusted, and already carrying more than anyone else. When a key role opens up, a team is probably already stretched thin. Morale may be slipping or clients may even be upset.
Add to that the pressure that most Founders feel to promote. We know that if we don’t create real advancement opportunities for our employees – one of the primary reasons people come to work at startups – our top performers will always be at risk of leaving.
When a promotion is needed, and when the business needs both growth and stability, your top performer starts to looks like Christmas morning.
One startup I worked with had grown faster than its systems and its people could absorb. The team was exhausted. They were working 15 hour days, creating daily workarounds to recurring tech problems, and dealing with frustrated clients. So, it was no surprise many of them were dusting off their resumes, as well.
To stabilize the situation, the company promoted one of its strongest individual contributors into a leadership role and increased compensation for the rest of the team.
The decision made sense in the moment. It addressed an urgent risk, rewarded someone who had carried a great deal, and signaled that the company was responding.
But the promotion didn’t come with a development plan.
The new leader had no structure for how to create process, no clarity about how to leverage delegation or raise concerns, and no real preparation for coaching their former peers.
Without any formal company investment in their leadership development, the new leader led using the skills that had always made them successful: they stepped in, solved problems, took on more, and worked harder.
Within three months, the team felt better, but their new leader was overwhelmed. She was still doing work that should have belonged to her direct reports, was constantly venting to her team about her stress, and wasn’t having the hard performance conversations the company needed her to have.
This is what happens when promotion is treated as the solution instead of the beginning of a transition.
Promotion is not preparation.
Promoting from urgency
Startup leaders rarely promote people casually. A promotion often represents several things at once:
- A reward for excellent performance.
- A signal that the company sees and values someone’s contribution.
- An attempt to retain a person who may leave without more money, title, scope, or influence.
- A quick answer to a real organizational gap.
- A promise that the company hires and develops the best.
None of those motivations is wrong. In fact, most of them are cultural promises we should aim to achieve.
The problem is that none of them answers the most important question: Is this person prepared to lead at the level the business requires?
A high-performing individual contributor knows how to do the job they have. But that skillset does not automatically translate into the ability to lead others.
| A strong individual contributor | An effective people leader |
|---|---|
| Delivers excellent work consistently | Creates the conditions for others to deliver |
| Solves problems quickly | Builds systems that prevent predictable problems |
| Takes responsibility for outcomes | Creates clear ownership across the team |
| Has mastery of the work | Coaches others toward strong outcomes |
| Is trusted for execution | Builds strategic trust, clarity, and accountability |
| Moves fast | Helps the team make good decisions at speed |
| Knows how they would do the work | Develops people with different strengths and styles to achieve their best results |
We frequently promote based on what’s easiest to see: speed, competence, reliability, technical mastery, loyalty, strong judgment, or – if we’re being honest – a person’s ability to make the founder feel less alone.
Founders, like all humans, naturally trust people who feel familiar—people who think similarly, move at a pace they respect, and solve problems in ways that make sense to them. That does not make our hiring decisions biased in a malicious way. But, it is a bias. A blind spot.
Because familiarity and trust are not the same as leadership readiness.
Leadership asks a person to do something fundamentally different than building success alone. That requires the ability to delegate, give feedback, manage conflict, set direction, create systems, coach toward outcomes, and tolerate the discomfort of letting someone else learn.
Many of which, ironically…are the exact skills top performers can find genuinely challenging to do.
What new managers do when they are unsupported
When people enter a new role, they tend to rely on the skills that have worked for them before.
A high-performing IC who has built their reputation by being responsive, capable, and strong may not know how to stop doing those things when they become a manager. They may feel pressure to prove the promotion was deserved. Or, they might worry that admitting uncertainty will make others question whether they were the right choice.
And, when you’re used to going fast and being excellent, it can make you want to claw out your own eyes watching someone else struggle. If you doubt me on that, make one of your seasoned sales reps sit through a bad pitch. The time it takes them to squirm in their seat before they have to jump up and take over can be clocked on an egg timer.
So they do what they know.
They step in.
They solve it themselves.
They work later.
They take on one more task.
They show their team exactly how they would do it.
The result often looks like one of these patterns:
- The new manager overfunctions and burns out.
- They do work that should belong to direct reports because delegation feels slower or riskier.
- They micromanage because they know the task but have not learned how to manage to outcomes.
- They avoid hard feedback because they are still emotionally attached to being liked by former peers.
- They continue doing their old job while trying to layer management on top of it.
- They become overly directive because they lack systems, trust, or confidence in how to coach.
- Or they pull back too far, assuming leadership means they should no longer be involved in the work at all.
None of those patterns means the person lacks potential. It means the organization has asked them to make a developmental leap without enough support.
That challenge is common. The Center for Creative Leadership reports that 26% of first-time managers did not feel ready to lead others. Nearly 60% received no training as they entered their first leadership role. And, unsurprisingly, a full 20% were rated as doing a poor job by their direct reports.
When you’re a startup with little room for error and razor thin margins – those percentages are not tenable. They equate to real hours lost and real dollars misspent.
The cost does not stop with the manager
When a new manager is unsupported, the impact is rarely contained to that person.
Their team experiences the consequences in the form of unclear expectations, uneven feedback, changing priorities, inconsistent decision-making, or a leader who oscillates between taking over and disappearing.
All too often, the founder ends up back in the function, resolving issues that were supposed to be delegated. The organization becomes more dependent on heroics at exactly the time it needs more scalable and automated systems.
This is why management development is not a perk you throw a few hundred dollars at every year. It is an investment in scale.
Gallup estimates that managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement. Hold up for a second on that stat – because it’s kind of staggering. 70% of the engagement of a team is determined by their direct manager.
In a startup, we need the highest levels of engagement from our employees. They’ve got to be all in; giving us their ideas, energy, and effort to accomplish our market disrupting goals.
And, we need them to stay. The same study found that employees were more likely to remain with the organization when their managers had strong support, authority, development, and performance-management infrastructure.
The goal is not to make every manager perfect. It’s to ensure every manager is supported.
Without it, a startup can accidentally take its most capable individual contributor, remove them from the work where they created the most immediate value, and then promote them to the level of their incompetence.
Before you make the promotion
A promotion does not need to be delayed until someone can completely do the job. But it shouldn’t happen without clarity about what the role requires and what support the person will need to succeed.
Before extending an offer, ask:
- What problem are we trying to solve?
Are we rewarding performance, retaining someone, filling an urgent gap, or selecting the person best prepared to lead at the next stage? - What will be different about this job?
Can we clearly articulate the difference between doing the work and leading people who do the work? - What leadership capabilities will matter most?
What will this person need to learn about delegation, feedback, coaching, decision-making, conflict, systems, prioritization, and accountability? What did their previous job do to prepare them for that? - Does this person actually want to manage people?
Or have we made management the only credible route to more money, influence, and career progression? - What authority will the role have?
Which decisions can this leader make independently? Where should they consult? What should they escalate and how? - What gaps are likely to show up?
The goal is not to disqualify a capable person for having gaps. It is to identify those gaps before they become failure points. So, what would this person need to learn? - What support will we provide?
Who will mentor them? Who will coach them? What regular feedback, resources, or peer support will they have? - Are we willing to invest?
A promotion comes with a cost beyond compensation. It’s made up of time, coaching, training, support, and attention from senior leaders. So, how much are you really willing to offer?
If the answers are unclear, close the gap on your own understanding before committing to a hire.
The promotion should be the beginning
The most important thing to remember is that promotion is not the finish line.
A promotion should not communicate, “We gave you this opportunity. Now prove you deserve it.”
It should say:
“We believe in your potential enough to give you this opportunity—and we’re willing to invest in what it will take for you to succeed.”
That investment does not require a corporate leadership academy or a large people-operations team.
It starts with really practical steps:
- A clear description of the future role.
- A simple assessment of current strengths and development gaps.
- Explicit decision rights and responsibilities.
- Regular time with a mentor, coach, or experienced leader.
- A 30-, 60-, and 90-day transition plan.
- A leadership resource library with useful tools, articles, recordings, templates, and examples that align with your company’s values and leadership needs.
- Ongoing conversations about both measurable outcomes and the experience of the team.
Growth has to be more than pressure
Startups promise people the chance to grow quickly. People join because they want that responsibility, learning, impact, and a chance to build something larger.
But rapid advancement without development is not growth. It’s exposure.
Companies that create investable teams with a strong leadership bench, institutional knowledge, and operational maturity can scale without burning through the people who made early growth possible.
If growth is the promise, development has to be the practice.
If you’re ready to invest in your leaders, Mindshift Advisors can help. We offer 1:1 Leadership Coaching and Group Leadership Trainings for the people you’re counting on to deliver for you. Set up a free call to learn more and let’s make your next promotions the best investments you’ve ever made.
