Managing Startups: Best Blog Posts

Chapter 48. Getting Promoted Too Quickly

Bijan Sabet

“He’s a star. Thank god he’s on the team.”

“He’s not scaling, it’s time to find a replacement.”

I’ve heard both of those lines from too many CEOs about someone on their management team.

In a hyper-growth company, those two sentences can be just a year or two apart.

So what’s happening here?

Sometimes it’s just that the person that was given the management job was a bad hire. Mistakes happen.

But the more common thing I’m seeing is the bad promotion. In this case bad promotion means premature promotion.

In the early days, when the company is small, the 10x achiever stands out. The founder/CEO looks at that person and appreciates all of the contributions. Then the next thing you know, that one person goes from being the first UI person or first iPhone developer, to being in charge of a soon-to-be-built team.

And that’s when it starts. All of a sudden you find that that person, who used to be an amazing individual contributor, doesn’t know how to manage a team. His team misses deadlines, quality of work suffers, and the biggest red flag of all happens—he can’t get amazing people to work for him.

It’s easy to see why this happens when you look at it from the outside (outside is defined as anyone not working full time in the company). The CEO wants to promote the stars, and there is something special about promoting from within. And the killer individual contributor may be ambitious and asking for the bigger ...