Why brilliant experts struggle in new roles, and what organisations can do about it.
It is a Wednesday evening in Dakar, and the government has just announced its new appointments. A university professor hears his name on the radio. Thirty years of lectures, generations of students, a reputation no one questions. He is now a minister. His colleagues call to congratulate him. His mother cries.
Six months later, things have stalled. The budget slips through his fingers. The civil service drags its feet. Talks with unions and donors go nowhere. He has not become less intelligent. He is doing a different job from the one he mastered, and nobody told him.
This is not only a story about politics. It happens every day in companies, public utilities and development programmes. The best technician becomes team leader. The top salesperson becomes sales director. The respected expert is put in charge of a regional programme. We reward people for what they have done and forget to look at what we are about to ask of them.
What travels, and what stays behind
Some skills travel with us from one job to the next: scientific training, sharp analysis, rigour, clear writing. They are what a good education gives you, and what a diploma shows.
Others only exist inside a particular mission, in a particular place. A minister must run an administration, settle a budget and hold firm with social partners. A site manager must plan, coordinate subcontractors and keep people safe. None of this appears on a CV. You see it in the results, or in their absence.
As early as 1964, the economist Gary Becker drew the line between knowledge that is useful anywhere and knowledge that only pays off in one setting. The second kind is learned on the job. No letter of appointment can grant it.
What the evidence says
In 1969, Laurence Peter and Raymond Hull put it with biting wit: in a hierarchy, people rise to their level of incompetence. We promote someone because they succeed where they are, never because they will succeed where they are going.
For decades this sounded like a joke. Then three economists, Alan Benson, Danielle Li and Kelly Shue, followed more than 53,000 salespeople in 214 American firms, about 1,500 of whom were promoted to manager. The best sellers were far more likely to be promoted. Once in charge, their teams sold less on average. The authors estimate that promoting the people with the best managerial potential instead could have lifted team sales by around 30 per cent. Selling and getting others to sell are two different trades.
Three kinds of skill
In a 1955 Harvard Business Review article, Robert Katz described three families of skill every leader needs: technical, human and conceptual. Every role mixes them, in different doses. At the bottom of the ladder you do the work. Higher up, you get others to do it. At the top, you decide which work is worth doing.
Our professor excelled at the first and at part of the third: teaching, research, thinking deeply about his field. In government he needed a different kind of judgement, one that chooses between national priorities, and above all a political feel for people that no lecture hall can teach.
Ken Blanchard offers a lens every manager should know. In his Situational Leadership model, the same person can be an expert at one task and a beginner at another, and a beginner needs direction and coaching before anyone can safely delegate. A newly promoted expert is often an enthusiastic beginner in the new role. Yet we treat them like a veteran, and leave them alone at the very moment they most need support.
Social intelligence comes first
Human skills rest on something deeper. In 1920 the psychologist Edward Thorndike called it social intelligence: the ability to understand people and act wisely with them. Daniel Goleman splits it in two: social awareness, which reads a room and its balance of power, and social facility, which can calm, persuade and rally.
A professor can be highly skilled in academic life and lost in government, where the codes, the allies and the opponents have all changed. He has to learn to read his surroundings again. A 2001 study of 192 students found that social intelligence explained their experience of leadership. Some caution is needed: a 2010 meta-analysis showed that the link between emotional intelligence and leadership weakens sharply in the most rigorous studies. A questionnaire is not enough. Social intelligence shows itself in action.
In Africa it matters even more. A project leader has to work with a ministry, traditional authorities, donors and partners from Asia or Europe, each with their own customs. Without that finesse, the best technical expertise goes nowhere.
The right person in the right place
Émile Durkheim saw the division of labour as the glue of modern societies: each person has a function, and solidarity grows out of how those functions fit together. That only works if each person is in the right one.
It starts with describing the mission before looking for the person: what results, in what setting, with whom. Then turn that mission into skills across the three kinds. Judge candidates on what they have achieved in similar situations rather than on their titles; as Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues in Skin in the Game, you only really know a trade once you have lived with its consequences. Close the gap from day one, with targeted training, a mentor or a partner for the first months. And measure what the mission delivers, not just the effort that goes into it.
In our technical assistance work, this is almost always where the first diagnosis lands. The skills exist inside the organisation. They are simply not in the right place, or not yet at the right level.
The next time a name is read out on a Wednesday evening, the question is worth asking: did we appoint the best person, or the right one?
Mansour Fall, founder of Scientech Solutions
Do your teams have the skills their missions demand?
Scientech Solutions helps African companies and institutions assess skills, define key roles and design training programmes fitted to each mission.
Sources
- Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull, The Peter Principle, 1969.
- Alan Benson, Danielle Li and Kelly Shue, Promotions and the Peter Principle, NBER Working Paper 24343; Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2019.
- Robert L. Katz, "Skills of an Effective Administrator", Harvard Business Review, 1955.
- Gary S. Becker, Human Capital, 1964.
- Ken Blanchard, Situational Leadership II model.
- Edward L. Thorndike, "Intelligence and its uses", Harper's Magazine, 1920.
- Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence, 2006.
- Lisa M. Kobe, Roni Reiter-Palmon and Jon D. Rickers, Self-reported leadership experiences in relation to inventoried social and emotional intelligence, Current Psychology, 2001.
- Peter D. Harms and Marcus Credé, Emotional Intelligence and Transformational and Transactional Leadership: A Meta-Analysis, Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, 2010.
- Émile Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society (1893).
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game, 2018.