Your Best Performer Could Be Your Worst Leader, and It's Not Their Fault

My whole practice rests on a belief that leadership can be built - that with the right structure, most people can grow into it. So it sits uncomfortably with me when I meet someone who proves the exception.

I worked with a leader who was, without question, one of the sharpest technical minds I've come across. Deep in their field. The kind of person other specialists defer to. Their organisation had almost nothing to teach them about the work itself.

But they led a team, and they hated it.

Not in a dramatic way. They didn't complain. They just quietly sidestepped it. One-on-ones got shortened or skipped. Difficult conversations got delayed until they resolved themselves, badly. Building relationships with the team wasn't something that slipped through the cracks - it was something they actively avoided. They were there to do a job, and they expected their staff to follow suit. Feedback came late and vague, if it came at all. Given the choice between sitting with a person's problem and sitting with a technical one, they picked the technical one every time, and nobody blamed them for it, because they were too good at the technical work to challenge.

The team needed a leader, and what it had instead was someone who'd come through the exact same pipeline they had - hired and rewarded for the same technical instincts, just as disinclined toward the relationship side of the job. Engagement was patchy. A couple of good people quietly started looking elsewhere. The organisation couldn't do much about it, because this person was close to irreplaceable in their specialty and everyone knew it.

This is not a character flaw. It's the predictable result of how a lot of organisations build career paths for technical experts.

In most specialised fields, there's a ceiling on how far you can rise without taking on people leadership. Get good enough at the work and the only lever left to pull is promotion into management, whether or not you have any aptitude or appetite for it. The person gets a bigger title, a direct report headcount, and a pay rise. What they don't get is training in confrontation, coaching, or relationship-building, because the promotion was a reward for technical mastery, not a hire for people leadership.

There's a name for this pattern. It’s called the Peter Principle. It’s the notion that people get promoted based on success in their current role, again and again, until they land in a role where they're no longer competent, and then they stay there. The organisation loses a brilliant individual contributor and gains a mediocre manager, and often doesn't notice the trade until the number of spot fires starts to escalate.

The seed is almost always sown during the hiring process. Recruit for deep technical ability and you tend to select for a fairly consistent personality profile alongside it: comfortable alone with a hard problem, uncomfortable with ambiguity in people, more interested in getting the answer right than getting the room on side. This can be hard to identify in a panel interview built around domain expertise. So the organisation fills its specialist ranks with exactly the people least inclined toward the leadership track it will later push them onto, then acts surprised when the promotion doesn't land.

If you're a senior leader with someone like this reporting into you, or you're in HR trying to manage the fallout, a few things are worth considering.

Ask before you assume

Stop assuming the fix is coaching alone. Coaching helps someone get better at leadership. It won't manufacture a desire for it that isn't there. Have the direct conversation before you spend a training budget: ask them whether they want to lead people, and believe the answer even if it's not the one you were hoping for. If the answer is no and there's a technical track for them to move onto, that's the honest fix, even if it takes reworking their role to get there. If there's no track to move them onto and leading people isn't optional, say so plainly and build in the structural support they'll need rather than hoping the discomfort resolves itself over time. What you can't do is leave someone in a leadership role they've told you they don't want and expect coaching alone to close the gap.

Fix the interview, not just the promotion

Close the gap in how you screen. Build a short, structured behavioural component into hiring for these roles, but have it asked by someone on the panel other than the hiring manager, who's usually focused on domain fit. Ask for a specific instance of giving a peer difficult feedback and how they had supported their growth. Be sure to pursue questioning until you get the actual behaviour, not the rehearsed answer. Check references specifically on this, not just technical output - ask past managers how the person handled disagreement or supported colleagues under pressure. None of this should screen out brilliant candidates, since you still need the technical depth. Treat it as data you keep and revisit, so a promotion decision three years later is grounded in something real rather than a guess made under pressure to reward tenure.

Build the evidence before you need it

Work with the qualification route rather than against it. If the path into the specialty offers almost no exposure to people skills by design, don't wait until the title changes to introduce them. Build structured, still-technical stretch opportunities into the years before anyone's considered for management: mentoring a junior specialist with an actual review cadence attached, running a working group with a defined deliverable, presenting findings to a non-technical stakeholder group, sitting on a hiring panel, reviewing someone else's work and having to explain the "why" behind the feedback. Track how each one goes, the same way you'd track technical milestones. None of it requires stepping outside their comfort zone into a management role. By the time someone is genuinely considered for people leadership, you have two or three years of real evidence about how they handle the human side.

Make the technical path lead somewhere

Build a real technical track, not a token one. A "principal" or other distinguished title without substance fixes nothing. It needs comparable pay bands to the management ladder at each level, real decision-making authority over technical direction, and visible status - a seat in the rooms where decisions get made, without a headcount attached. Set out the criteria for advancing on this track as clearly as you would for management: depth of expertise, influence on technical direction, mentoring impact, contribution to standards or practice. Some of your most valuable people should be able to keep rising for the rest of their career without ever running a team, and the path needs to be real enough that choosing it doesn't read as opting out of success.

The broader pattern here is bigger than any one person. Organisations routinely conflate seniority with leadership capability, as though excellence in a discipline automatically converts into skill at leading humans through it. It doesn't. They are two different jobs, and most organisations only have one title for both. Your most technically brilliant person might be the wrong person to lead a team. That's not a failure of theirs. It's a failure of the ladder you built.