We promoted them because they were brilliant at the job they were doing, but nobody ever taught them how to lead people, and nobody stopped to ask whether they actually should. Photo: File.
More than half a century after Canadian educator Laurence Peter enunciated his famous principle, Sonia McDonald says we are still promoting good people into positions for which they are entirely unsuited.
Somewhere in your organisation right now, there is probably a leader who is technically excellent, deeply knowledgeable, and genuinely well-intentioned — who is also slowly, quietly, making their team miserable.
It’s not because they’re a bad person; it’s because nobody ever taught them how to lead people, and nobody stopped to ask whether they actually should.
We promoted them because they were brilliant at the job they were doing and we assumed the rest would follow.
It didn’t. It never does, and the cost — to the people in their team, to the organisation, and often to the leader themselves — is enormous.
This is the promotion problem nobody wants to talk about, and after 30 years working with leaders and organisations across the globe, I’m done with staying polite about it.
So, I’ll say it out loud: The talents that make a person brilliant in their previous role are almost never the same ones that will make them effective as a leader.
As far back as 1969, Canadian educator Laurence Peter observed something that should have changed everything: “In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to their level of incompetence.”
We called it the Peter Principle. We laughed, and then we kept doing exactly what he described.
Fifty years later, a landmark study of nearly 40,000 workers across 131 companies confirmed the pattern hasn’t budged.
Organisations systematically promote their best performers — even when those people end up making worse managers, and even when better predictors of leadership quality are sitting right in front of them.
Gallup’s research is even more direct. It found that 82 per cent of the time, organisations choose the wrong person for leadership roles — almost always because the decision was based on technical skill rather than the ability to lead people.
Here’s what we never say clearly enough: The moment you become responsible for people, your entire job description changes. Not slightly — completely.
Before the promotion, success looked like output, expertise, hitting targets, and being the most capable person in the room. Those skills got them noticed. Those skills earned the reward.
However, after the promotion, success looks like this: Staying steady when everything is on fire; creating a space where people dare to speak up; saying the hard thing with care, not avoidance.
A leader must be successful at building trust slowly, showing up when the stakes are highest; knowing how you relate to others, not just how you feel inside, and actually listening, not just waiting to talk.
They must give feedback as well as receive it, not making it personal either way.
These skills were not in the performance review that led to the promotion. They aren’t taught at university and many have never even been discussed, let alone developed.
When a leader is under stress, pressure, uncertainty, or threat, their brain doesn’t stay rational. It defaults to survival. Neuroscientists call it the amygdala hijack.
The brain’s threat-detection system fires faster than the prefrontal cortex — the part responsible for rational thinking and emotional regulation — can respond.
The result is a leader who becomes reactive, defensive, controlling and avoidant. Who, in the moments that matter most to their team, is neurologically operating in self-protection mode.
It’s not because they’re evil, it’s because no-one ever taught them to recognise what’s happening in their own nervous system — let alone how to interrupt it.
Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson spent decades researching what separates high-performing teams from the rest.
Her answer is psychological safety — the belief that it’s safe to speak up, take risks, and admit mistakes without fear.
The brutal truth is that one emotionally unsafe leader can destroy the environment completely.
Team trust erodes, slowly, silently, until it’s gone; high performers leave because they always have the most options; innovation dies, culture calcifies and the leader burns out from carrying a role they were never equipped for.
The most courageous thing an organisation can do is decide that leadership capability is non-negotiable before the promotion — not after.
The best organisations I work with have made a fundamental shift. They’ve stopped treating leadership as the natural next step after a strong individual performance.
They treat it as a distinct capability — one that needs to be assessed, developed, and supported deliberately. They don’t just ask whether the candidate is brilliant at their job. They ask if they have the emotional intelligence to lead under pressure. Can they hold a courageous conversation without collapsing or crushing? Do they create safety — or do they create fear?
Are they self-aware enough to know how they’re affecting others? Can they regulate themselves when everything is hard? Do they build trust, or do they demand compliance?
Most importantly, are they willing to grow — or do they already think they’ve arrived?
Leadership is not a title. It never was. It’s how you show up for people every day, under pressure, when it’s hard and when nobody’s watching.
Sonia McDonald is the CEO and founder of Brisbane-based LeadershipHQ. She works with leaders and organisations at the exact point where pushing through stops working and something more human, more courageous, is required. She can be contacted at soniamcdonald.com.au/. This article first appeared on Sonia’s website.
