Most Bad Bosses Were Once Sweet Individual Contributors…

Let’s call it what it is.  You know people in your company who are really good at one thing, but really stink at a bunch of other things.  That’s not a huge issue when the person is an individual contributor (let’s call them a savant to focus on the fact they are super in one important area to your business).  As an individual contributor, you can usually wall them off and keep them out of harm’s way. 

Except for email.  You probably wish you could take that away from them, but you can’t.  Apparently, this Internet thing isn’t a fad.

Back to the issue – The problem with the savants in your organization is that their critical strength is projected to other areas, like managing others.  From Steve Roesser at All Things Workplace:

"Do Any of These Situations Look Familiar?

Global Operations Director who hits all of the monetary goals but no one wants to work with her. They don’t trust her because she withholds information and doesn’t include other managers in decisions that impact how they do their work.

Brilliant Vice President of Finance who can’t conduct meetings, doesn’t like to plan, and knows more ways to help the company earn money on its money than its bankers do. Up for promotion for top job. Really doesn’t want it. People love working with him because they learn from him. He wants to continue developing investment methods and models.

Director of Regulatory Compliance. No one explains new (regulated) products to the government better than this guy. So what’s the problem? To the company it means the difference between a commercial product or nothing new to sell. His direct reports described their feelings toward him as "hate" (never a real good sign). They say he is a "bully," "condescending," and "has no patience with anyone he thinks is less intelligent than him." When offered the possibility of being a high-level individual contributor, the director digs in his heels and says, "No. I want to be a manager."

What are we seeing here? 

It’s actually easy to explain: we simply cannot believe that someone who is "intelligent" could actually act so "stupid." What we’re doing is responding to a single, outstanding talent or skill automatically ascribing other attributes that we think must certainly be there. We then look at academic credentials and technical performance and believe that, somehow, we must be wrong. (Otherwise, why would we have hired and then promoted the person? Here it becomes a little self-defensive on our part, but who wants to look at that?:-)"

It’s a great post by Steve, so click over to get his take on how to handle the over-promoted savant, and find out what happened in his examples above.

I’m reminded of the tried and true motto several of my mentors have used regarding succession planning: "The best widget maker doesn’t always make the best widget maker manager".  It applies to high level positions as well as promotions from the ranks for entry level supervisor positions.

The same skills that made you successful in your current role can’t be projected to other roles – especially leadership roles.

And that’s why we have salary ranges for positions – so we can take the star individual contributor and grow them over a decade to the max salary for their position – without subjecting the rest of the organization to a test tube experiment in management gone bad….