Every Promotion Is a Bet That Past Performance Predicts Future Performance in a Different Job

Promotion in most hierarchies is based on demonstrated success in a current role, which seems reasonable until you notice that the skills required in the next role up are often substantially different, not just a bigger version of the same job. A brilliant individual contributor promoted into management is being evaluated on their coding or sales ability, then asked to instead manage, delegate, and develop other people — a mostly unrelated skill set.

Taken to its logical conclusion, this produces a specific and common outcome: people rise through a hierarchy exactly as long as they keep succeeding, and stop rising the moment they reach a role that requires skills they don't have — meaning a meaningful share of any hierarchy's positions end up occupied by people who were excellent at the job one level below the one they're currently doing.

The fix implied by this concept isn't to stop promoting good performers — it's to stop assuming competence at one level automatically predicts competence at the next, and to build evaluation, training, and even reversible promotion paths that account for that gap explicitly, rather than treating every promotion as a one-way, unquestionable bet.