Congratulations, You’re the Manager. Sorry About Your Life.

Send us Fan MailEpisode 270This episode is about one of the most common promotion traps at work: taking the person who is brilliant at doing the job and assuming they’ll naturally be brilliant at leading everyone else who does it.Ish and Sacha unpack why technical excellence and leadership ability are two very different things, why promotion has become the default way organisations reward high performers, and what can go wrong when somebody moves from doing the work to enabling other people to do great work.They talk about paying your stars more instead of automatically giving them people to manage, testing internal candidates against the external market, looking for openness to feedback, and dealing with the awkward truth that the skill or behaviour you ignore now will probably become a much bigger problem later.There’s also a lost Australian gig and a moment of silence for money never earned. Sacha discovering that relief can tell you quite a lot about the work you actually want to do, and a late recommendation for a TV series involving manipulated CCTV footage. Naturally.Key Learnings1. Being brilliant at the work doesn’t automatically make you brilliant at leading it2. Promotion shouldn’t be the only way to reward great people3. Leadership means shifting from “me” to “you”4. Look for people who are hungry for feedback5. Don’t hire internally just because it’s convenient