In every organization there is a common story: somebody is the star performer and gets all of the jobs done perfectly; six months later that same person feels overwhelmed and frustrated and you cannot understand what is going wrong.

Nothing. This person simply hit a wall that is common for most organizations.

The theory in layman’s terms

Back in 1969, Laurence Peter, a researcher, observed something interesting about promotion policies in most organizations: people are promoted for their previous performance, without checking if they would be fit for the new position. Thus, they keep climbing higher, getting a promotion after another, till they reach a point when the new position surpasses their capabilities and then they stop. Year after year they perform their duties that do not suit them, as what got them promoted was not required in their new position at all.

That is basically the whole theory and it may seem too obvious to be true, yet most of us witnessed it at least once in our lifetime.

What it actually looks like

Imagine a sharp, agile, problem-solving engineer whose clients love working with him. Their contractors like him. They are being recommended as project manager.

Project manager does not look much like the engineer’s old job. It is budgets, dealing with client-side politics, schedule conflicts, and managing people who used to be his peers. None of the skills that made him such a great engineer show up on a spreadsheet or a phone call with a difficult client. A year later, projects start falling apart, the old team feels either micromanaged or neglected depending on the day, and an engineer who loved his old job dreads Mondays.

Nobody did anything intentionally wrong. The company was rewarding a great performance the only way it knew how – with a promotion. An engineer was saying yes, since saying no to a promotion is career suicide in most workplaces. The job itself was just requiring a completely different set of skills.

But why this keeps happening when everyone knows about it

First, it has something to do with the structure. In many companies, the only “up” path is vertical. Without a title increase and real raise, ambitious employees will try to climb the hierarchy in hopes of promotion into managerial positions, although they really don’t want to manage people.

Second, fear of losing good employees plays a huge role in these processes. Promoting an employee into leadership position is a safer option compared to risking getting a letter of resignation from him/her because of a competition. Although, everybody understands that the match is not right.

And third, the problem is that nobody asks the obvious question in advance. Would you prefer to work in a meeting with giving feedback and resolving conflicts, or would you rather spend your time on the work you excel at? Usually, no one asks it because it’s implied that the answer is going to be “yes”, especially if there is money and title in it.

But what really works

This does not mean stop hiring good people. This means hiring them into the right position.

Ask directly, before the offer, whether the person wants to become a manager or continue their career as a specialist. Both are good professions. Only one of them involves managing teams.

Create a real opportunity to stay in technology. When the only path to earning more money and getting a new title is having direct reports, you will be pushing talented specialists into the management positions they did not ask for and you will lose both the specialist and the team she/he got stuck with.

Evaluate the promotion based on future tasks, not current ones. Your success in the current job does not say anything about your ability to lead people who will have to do it. Search for the signs of future skill set: patience with newcomers, tolerance for ambiguity, ability to provide feedback without killing people.

And create a path to retreat from it that isn’t perceived as a defeat. Some of the most talented individual contributors in any business are those who attempted managing, hated it, and got to step back into their true role, without being considered to demote.