The Comfortable Lie We All Keep Re-telling
Every tech leader knows the fairy tale: “Great at code = great at people.”
We spot a developer whose pull-requests sparkle, whose architectural sketches belong in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and we conclude: Surely the next logical step is management. Hand them a team, a budget sheet, and calendar invites labeled one-on-one—problem solved, succession assured, meritocracy intact.
Why do we cling to that script?
- It feels efficient. One promotion fills a leadership gap and “rewards” performance in a single stroke.
- It flatters our worldview. If craft excellence naturally matures into leadership excellence, we can skip the messy bits—behavioral coaching, emotional labor, process literacy.
- It defers the real work. Designing dual career paths, running mentorship programs, and funding effective leadership curricula requires time and resources. A title change? Five minutes in the HR system.
The story is seductive precisely because it postpones accountability. We tell ourselves we’re empowering talent while really outsourcing leadership development to hope and good intentions.
The Uncomfortable Truth (and Why It Hurts)
Promoting the wrong way doesn’t multiply talent—it divides it. Here’s how the math actually plays out:
- Lost Throughput
Your top coder’s flow time evaporates under meeting overload. Velocity graphs flatten, incident queues grow, and suddenly the only one who understood the core module’s dark corners is too busy running sprint ceremonies to refactor them. - Half-Formed Leadership
Technical mastery provides exactly zero reps in conflict mediation, coaching awkward juniors, translating KPIs into meaning, or defending budgets to product marketing. Lacking those muscles, the new lead leans on what they know: code metrics. The team notices—and disengages. - Silent Turnover
The “reward” quickly feels like a swap: deep work for calendar chaos, elegant abstractions for emotional entropy. The promoted developer updates LinkedIn, while the remaining developers wonder whose head is next on the altar. - Quality Debt
Marginal leadership is evident in customer-visible defects, including unclear priorities, rushed fixes, brittle releases, and talent churn that erodes domain context. Quality managers (hi, that’s me) see the defects long before finance sees the costs.
Put bluntly: you traded an A-level technician for a C-level manager and a demoralized team—all because the promotion path was smoother than the preparation path.
“But Some Devs Do Become Great Leaders!”
Absolutely. The problem isn’t the who; it’s the how. Leadership success isn’t a genetic twist unlocked by a title. It’s desire, training, feedback loops, and systemic support. Remove any of those, and even the most people-centric engineer will flounder.
Promotion Without Perdition: A Better Deal for Everyone
The fix is neither exotic nor expensive—it just requires intent. Here are five moves that prevent the sacrificial ceremony:
- Ask, Don’t Assume
Before sending the promotion email, run a candid discovery: Do you actually want to lead? Leadership is a career change, not a pay bump. Some devs will say “not now,” and that’s a productivity victory, not a setback. - Create Dual Career Tracks
Staff-Plus, Principal Engineer, Distinguished Architect—whatever you call it, a parallel path allows technical excellence to continue compounding, delivering the highest ROI. - Treat Promotion Like Product Launch
Run a beta: limited team scope, clear success criteria, access to a mentor. Release notes after 90 days, iterate, and then roll out to a broader audience. You wouldn’t deploy untested code to prod; why do it with leadership? - Install Leadership Enablement, Not Just Learning & Development (L&D)
Training is content; enablement is context. Pair formal instruction (coaching conversations, budgeting, conflict skills) with on-the-job shadowing and real-time feedback. Quality Management embeds these ladders into every transformation program—because upskilling managers is cheaper than rehiring engineers. - Instrument the Human Metrics
If you graph latency, you can graph psychological safety. Quarterly pulse surveys, turnover-risk heat-maps, mentorship-hours tracked—make the invisible visible and you’ll correct course before farewell cakes are ordered.
What Changes for the Business?
- Velocity rebounds as experts stay in their flow state or acquire leadership skills without abandoning their craft.
- Quality indicators improve—fewer production regressions, less rework, more predictable releases.
- Engagement scores climb because employees see career growth that respects their strengths.
- Retention stabilizes, cutting backfill costs and preserving domain knowledge.
The QM Layer
Quality Management embeds talent enablement alongside architecture, quality, and innovation, ensuring leadership growth never occurs in a vacuum. Whether you need a one-off upskilling sprint, a dual-track career lattice, or a fractional leadership coach, the goal is the same: elevate people without exiling them from their genius.