Being Great at the Work Doesn’t Make You Great at Leading It

I think we make a mistake in business when we assume that the people who are best at doing something are, by default, the people best equipped to lead others who do that same thing.

Leading and doing are different skill sets.

Sports probably provides the easiest analogy. Being a Hall of Fame athlete is not a prerequisite for becoming a Hall of Fame coach. In fact, some of the greatest coaches were never exceptional players, and some of the greatest players have struggled tremendously when they moved into coaching.

That makes perfect sense when you think about what each role actually requires.

A great player needs to be able to perform at an exceptionally high level. A great coach needs to understand why people perform the way they do, recognize what is preventing someone from performing better, communicate effectively, develop talent, create a strategy, make adjustments, hold people accountable, and figure out how to get the best out of a group of individuals with different strengths, weaknesses, personalities, and motivations.

Those are not the same skills.

Yet in business, we routinely take the best salesperson and make them the sales manager. We take the strongest individual contributor and put them in charge of the team. We take someone who has demonstrated that they are exceptionally good at producing an outcome themselves and assume that means they will be exceptionally good at producing that outcome through other people.

Sometimes they are. Sometimes they aren't.

The point is not that great doers cannot become great leaders. Of course they can. The point is that their ability to do the job should not, by itself, be considered evidence that they can lead people doing the job.

If anything, I think we should evaluate leadership potential as its own competency.

Because the question isn't simply, "How good are you at this?"

The more important question might be, "How good are you at making everyone around you better at this?"