You didn’t just promote your highest-performing employee. You put a second job on top of the one she already had.
Six months in, she’s still handling the hardest clients, still approving everything, and now six or seven people are interrupting her all day too. You wonder why she hasn’t stepped up. She wonders why she spent all day managing people and feels like she got nothing done.
Before you decide she’s bad at delegating, look at what you designed. The goals got written down with numbers. The roadmap never did. Nobody said what she stops, who picks up the old work, or how long the handoff should take, so she took the only road she knows, the one that made her great.
And it’s never just one person. When she moves up, the layer beneath her has to move up too, which is why I’ve seen senior transitions take 12 to 24 months. Her strengths don’t scale on their own, either. Energy becomes disruption. Customer obsession becomes rescuing. Same strengths, bigger room, different effect.
IN THIS EPISODE
- Why the strengths that earned the promotion start working against her, and what happens when your team outgrows the way you lead
- Why doing it yourself is faster today, and what you’re really buying when you hand it off anyway
- The five conversations that turn a new title into an actual promotion, plus a client named Nina on why the confidence comes afterwards
THE FIVE PROMOTION CONVERSATIONS (put them on a calendar)
- What are you stopping? She lists what made her successful that can no longer eat her time. If nothing comes off the list, it’s overload, not a promotion. Tip: dump a typical week into your AI tool and sort it into stop, hand off, keep. It doesn’t know what matters, she does, but it gets the list out of her head.
- Who gets the old work? Name an owner for each piece, whether they’re ready, what judgment has to transfer, and where you actually need to hire.
- What is her new value? What does she contribute now that she wasn’t responsible for before? Say it in a sentence.
- How will the team know what good looks like? Why it matters, what can vary, what can’t, and when to escalate.
- What’s the timeline? Define 90 days, 6 months, 12 months, and what tells you she’s really leaving the old job.
If you’re the boss: subtract work explicitly, rebuild the layer beneath her, reward the new behavior, protect the transition, and give her a thinking partner.
TRY THIS THIS WEEK
Pick one person you promoted in the last year and have conversation one. Write down three things that come off her plate this month and who picks up each one. Names, actual humans, not departments. Then tell her new value in one sentence. If you can’t, that’s work, and it’s yours. If you’re the one with the bigger title, take these five conversations to your boss and ask for them.
Promoting strong individual contributors into bigger leadership roles? This is the leadership development I do with executives and organizations. Start at dawnandrews.com.
RESOURCE
The Feedback Fix, the free download for giving feedback that lands.
CHAPTERS
00:00 A second job on top of the first
03:00 The destination with no road on it
07:00 The tornado: when strengths stop scaling
09:30 The five conversations
02:30 What the boss owes her, and Nina
“Promoting someone isn’t a reward for being great at their old job. It’s asking them to learn a new one.”
