Promoting your best employee feels like a reward. Sometimes it’s actually a setup for two failures instead of one.

Earlier this year, Meta began laying off roughly 8,000 employees as part of a restructuring the company described internally as “AI native,” flattening its management layers and reorganizing teams into smaller, faster-moving pods. The company’s Chief People Officer told staff that many teams could now operate with a leaner structure and fewer managers overseeing more ownership per person. The management layer itself was being redesigned out of the org chart, regardless of how those managers had performed.

That should give any leader pause before promoting their next star performer into a management role. There used to be room to get a promotion wrong. A struggling new manager could be quietly reassigned, or the org chart could absorb one bad fit without much notice. That room is shrinking. When companies are actively cutting the number of management slots available, the ones that remain carry more weight — a mis-promotion can cost the team a layer of leadership it may not get another shot at building.

I’ve coached executive teams across a dozen industries, and I see this mistake repeated more than almost any other. A company promotes its best individual performer into a leadership role, and performance drops on both sides. The star feels lost, the team feels misled, and nobody stops to ask the one question that would have prevented it: Is this person actually ready to lead the people who do the work, or are they just exceptional at doing the work themselves?

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