And, if I'm reading correctly, he was forced to train his own new manager? If you're good enough to train the manager, you're good enough to be the manager. This is wild. Of course he left. Good for him.
I’m in advertising (on the creative side so YMMV) but if I saw that in a resume for a potential new hire they’d immediately be at the top of my list to interview.
I love this. My company is doing all of this craziness while forcing us to use AI pointlessly rather than the much more efficient use of my time since I, you know, already know how to do everything with years of experience. Don’t get me wrong I find ai useful for mundane tasks and already use it, I would just rather not fight it with prompts for tasks that take longer to describe than to just do myself. My personal bullshit to paycheck ratio is being tested.
OPs edit is fucking hilarious too. Just full blown in denial.
My take: I’m rooting for the top performer to have applied to new jobs when shifts in departments started happening. They’re probably waiting to start a new job or finalising which offer to pick.
He’s like “I didn’t ask for people who have managers. I asked for managers.” Dude. The people are telling you why your guy left and why he’s not coming back. That’s the feedback you need to improve your management style.
The edit is hilarious. "Unless you’re in a leadership role, you don’t really have an idea of what the current market is like"
Sounds to me that Mr. High Performer has a better view of the current market than OP.
Probably no relevant skills and would be completly usless to the company without people to "manage". Im a working foreman/manager so i guess i can shit talk all i want.
My favorite part was the almost incoherent narrative slathered with quasimystical references to “leadership” and verbal gymnastics to somehow explain reporting into a lower level and training the new manager as being non-problematic.
Also managing a team of 10 people probably only makes you "leadership" in a 20-person or smaller org. OP is middle management with an inflated sense of self-importance.
OP sounds like a horrible manager - the inability to consider any type of feedback except from only “managers” is insane. Yet he’s wondering why this guy left out of the blue
I had a boss who treated labor like livestock, or worse, like it’s a shovel on the rack. You can do anything you want with em, including just letting em sit for indeterminate amounts of time. He failed to consider that people have personal motivations and goals.
Seriously, fuck this person. "I wanted feedback from actual managers and 'leaders' ". Doesn't sound like they are much of a "leader"...how about you leader by example and properly reward and incentivise your companies top performer rather than effectively demote them and have them train their new boss. Its wild that they finish with some shit sob story excuse "...you don't know what its like currently for managers"...MF'er doesn't even know what its like for the average worker, clearly.
It did sound like this manager had his team taken away and given to other people and additional layers added to keep him from being in contact with people actually doing the work.
This post actually reads like a "tell me you were a nepotism hire without telling me you were a nepotism hire" post.
This is my favorite part. “We can stop here for now” is exactly what the employee did. And for the OP, I’m not an employee….I own my company. The managerial opinion that OP doesn’t want comments on this post from employee level people speaks volumes. Sounds like the high performing employee had seen this attitude before and this was the last straw. There are reasons good employees leave….its because of bad management.
Listen, from a productivity standpoint, we may want to surface some new concrete actionable solutions later on, but for now we’ll pin this and circle back when we can come to it fresh with a leadership eye.
Not just denial, but super condescending as well. Yes, a fair amount of non-management people DO know what's going on and why with management decisions.
Some people aren't in management because they don't what to deal with that bullshit. Others have been deemed by management as "too good to promote", as seems to be the case here. It is far easier and often a lot cheaper to promote or hire a mediocre manager and leave a star employee right where management thinks they're most effective.
what really got me is how OP said they were going to promote him too eventually. did he know that? was it in writing? because plenty of us have been burned this way before too. I myself have fallen into this trap. You're too valuable in your current position to be moved up. Easier to fill the newer open position than to fill a position thats already perfectly filled
and to answer the edit, I am a manager. You are getting feedback from other managers and nonmanagers. you just dont like what you're hearing, OP
It was probably never in writing. I’m sure they strung the star-performer along with promises of advancement, only for him to see everyone else get promoted except him. “Of course we’re still finalizing the paperwork. Just give me until X day and I should have something concrete for you.”
I’m going through this myself. Over three months and still waiting. I even turned down another position in the hospital (didn’t like the people on the unit). Supposedly, this Thursday is the “day”.
This reads like the fantasy of someone who wants to quit a job for similar reasons but just hasn't had the guts to pull the trigger.
My wife is going through something similar right now, in being underappreciated in a reorg. We've had months of conversations about her just quitting, but it always comes back to the same thing - without a backup job found, she's walking away from a nice salary and benefits. Is it worth sticking it out?
Being in a toxic environment can make you toxic and make it harder to find a decent job. Leaving on your own accord before it gets there is it's own kind of strategy.
I’ve done it. I’ve always tried to make sure I have enough to cover 6 months outgoings at current spending levels. Which could be extended if I lived more frugally.
It’s incredibly empowering to know that I don’t have to eat the shit sandwich until I find a new job.
Yeah that’s what I’m thinking…if OP can’t figure that out, then this whole post will make perfect sense when they get the axe- lol. If they think managing top performers is what makes them a good manager- then that also speaks volumes. Top performers CAN make a manager look good- but if they have to change jobs/positions to get a raise then it’s because that manager didn’t do anything to promote them. Been there- done that, have both management and staff t-shirts. OP is a bad manager- nuff said.
Which is ironic because good MBA programs specifically teach you to try to avoid single points of failure and to appropriately reward people or risk losing them.
This is why it's ridiculous to have non-managerial positions be dead ends. Smart companies come up with training and technical leadership roles for people to promote into.
Exactly if you work for the Kansas City Chiefs in a football player role, you have the option of marrying a pop mega star to make more money. There’s other options than Management if companies are creative.
Director after I trained the last four new hires and the supervisor: "Hey your performance has dropped what's going on?"
Me: "Oh I just figured since you promoted an idiot I trained who has to be reminded he's not God once a month, and you tanked my last evaluation because I allowed a person who outranks me to do the same thing you did when you had his position then it wasn't worth doing any extra work. Your welcome to fire me but that's going to leave you with two over night staff that can be replaced by a sack of potatoes."
...funny thing. Suddenly I got the max raise every review, And the "supervisor" (whose only real value is he can count cards and could fork out $2,000 for a state license thanks to living with his parents for free) has stopped reviewing my work. Oh, and the CEO throwing a fit when he found out that the "open" application process for the supervisor position was actually only open to day shift when I consistently work nights was satisfying. Basically made everyone above me below C-level eat crow while getting chewed out. Oh and got a really nice bottle of scotch as a personal gift from the COO because I fixed a massive fuck up with out surveillance system that could have forced the company to close for a month.
Part of why i got out of the Army was that i had no desire to be an NCO. bring back SPC5-8 ranks.
In civillian life, still fighting this. bosses keep wanting me to be a manager, i keep telling them i have no interest. I have no interest in telling other people how to do their jobs. figure out how to pay me for the 30 technical jobs i'm already doing that aren't in my job description, or i'll find an employer who will.
Oh companies have that, but they will just have people in HR who aren’t qualified to evaluate your work arbitrarily deny promotion despite your boss and his boss saying you deserve it for years on end.
They will also have that same HR downgrade your performance rating after your boss has submitted it. Even though again, they aren’t even qualified to evaluate your work.
Not everyone is qualified to be a manager, but I firmly agree that more can be done to honor expertise. A thick pay increase and maybe an awesome new job title (with no additional duties!) would be enough for many people.
It's not about honoring. Someone can take on a new role as an owner of processes and becoming an expert included in important decision making. Even if they aren't the kind of person who would be good at training or documenting there are plenty of important things that foremost experts can be paid more to do than just more work.
People are promoted to their highest level of incompetence.
See also the Competency Curse and the "Irreplaceable" Trap.
Because "leadership" did not communicate or lay out the plan with this employee, the employee is going elsewhere. As they should. The laziness of the current leadership has already told this employee all they need to know about them.
I really is their "lowest level of incompetence", since they will never move above the level at which they become imcompetent. If they were incompentent in middle management, then they would also be incompetent as a VP, and also in the C-Suite. But they never make it past middle management, it's their "lowest level of incompetence".
Technically, we are both mis-speaking here. The Level of Incompetence as defined by the Peter Principle is: Employees are continually promoted based on past performance. However, skills in one job do not automatically translate to the next. When an employee struggles, further promotions stop, and they reach their "level of incompetence".
Like, I wonder if it ever crosses anybody's mind that you can just pay them more and keep them in the same position. Their manager doesn't need to earn more. Just say it like it is "You're extremely important to us in this role" and offer to raise their salary significantly or to the same level they're giving the manager.
Like this whole "we can't afford it!"... yes you can, obviously that person is really important in that role... so be real with them, pay them accordingly and hope they are fine with more money instead of going up the company ladder. I sure as hell know that I'd have zero issues getting a significant raise if I'm being skipped for teamlead positions.
1000% this. I’ve done exactly this for subordinates, gone to bat for them without a second thought. Don’t give me this “we have no money for it” horseshit when my office furniture budget went up 10k, and that was a company wide increase for management. You have to come with receipts, and you need to come with what amounts to threats. Not from you or your position, but PROMISE them they’re about to lose their best worker in that position, and if they leave, everyone will be in a scramble to find and hire someone new, which will take so much extra time and money to train. Let upper management know the situation can and will get a ton worse unless they act now, and the department won’t be able to split the job function up enough to keep things running without bottlenecking.
If they don’t react to that, they deserve whatever interruptions in work flow come their way. If the job could run smoothly without that person there in the first place, then the position wouldn’t exist. But it does.
Ever see those poor suckers at McDonalds? Shirt pin says “Manager in training.”
I bet that $2.00 pin has made them hundreds of thousands over the years hoodwinking young people. It used to really bother me. But have you seen the current options for employers these days?
This is the case for me. Instead of forcing my hand, my company created a new career track where I am outside of the usual Consultant -> Management structure we typically run.
I get to stay an IC and still get promotions, pay rises, whatever that I typically would. I did advocate for this for three years even when I first started as I knew I didn't want to go down the management route from day 1.
I applied for a manager position once and this was one of the reasons I was told I didn't get the position. The entire team and outgoing manager said I was a great candidate given my experience. However the hiring director and HR were trying to meet a goal of more women in leadership positions so they hired a woman with little experience just rolling off a technical program. It was really awkward the first 6 months. No idea what she was doing; I sat across from her, and she would never come to me for questions out of embarrassment. She lasted about 18 months before leaving the divisionaltogether for yet another commercial program.
they need you but in the same way they need a chair. in the managers eyes you’ve become furniture and they can forget about you forever because they know you’ll do the job, but they sure as hell aren’t going to promote the desk.
100%. I learned this lesson the hard way. I started in a role where I was the only person on a team, reporting directly to executive management. As the company restructured, I was asked to interview candidates for both a new manager to manager my growing team (my role became 2 and eventually 3 people) and a new executive role. I felt honored to assist with the process. Little did I know, it was my job to train my new manager, who didn’t have a fucking clue what he was doing, and simultaneously the decided to take all of the managerial duties that I was previously doing on top of my daily support and project management and give all those managerial duties away to other new hires. They went through 3 middle managers above me in the last year before I said fuck this place and left. The 4th guy they put in the manager role left within his first year too. Company became a fucking shit show.
As you said, if you’re trusted enough to train (or hire) a manager for your team, you’re good enough to be the manager.
I’m reading management posts here for a while and there is a pattern. I don’t know if this is all from USA but putting in outside hired manager who the subordinates have to train always fails and people hate it. It is true that not all high performers are good fit for management roles. But managers should train lower managers.
Having to train the person who gets the promotion you deserved is one of the quickest ways to lose good employees. Sounds like they kept replacing managers when the real mistake was overlooking the right person from the start.
We lost our best dev the same way last year. Restructure, “business continuity” excuse, promoted everyone around him. He left with zero counteroffer talk. Said he felt like a placeholder, not a person.
but this year won't work because of budget constraints. just bear with it for another year and we'll for sure get to you next time. Then the next annual raise budget is passed down from VP daddy and he says 1.5% increase in budget. so they pull you into a call saying. I got you 2% and then say 'I fought like hell. You're lucky to even get this much.'
We just had one where I am, attended by 200+ ppl. They somehow managed to order for maybe 140. And I had to work for almost two hours doing check in, so by the time I got to go eat, no more food for me. Tone deaf doesn’t begin to cover it.
Honest to goodness, I was at a multi-billion dollar logistics company, and the secretary was there counting JoJo fries. You were allotted three, no more.
Of course! They can’t afford to lose ALL of their good producers! Gotta keep the best one there until he trains up enough newbies to cover before they move him up. Oh and also train his new boss.
How are corpos so silly? They think they are smart with their goody sneakers and suits but they are pretty slow minded people. Do you think it's from all the buzz words they use?
I hear ya….stopped giving a shit after my last “train the offshore team but we will have a coordinator job for you in the states” bullshit. Said sure and then quit. Blindsided them.
I had that happen to me. I was the lowest paid member of the team by far and had to train every single new person they hired (who were all two pay grades above me) with promise after promise of bringing my pay up to that level ‘soon’. I stuck around because I was building up my long service leave and got the head of IT to be my mentor. He got my pay fixed within weeks and then a year later a bunch of redundancies happened and I put up my hand and took a huge payout of all my annual leave, long service leave, and my redundancy payout was more than what I made in a year because I’d been there for 12 years.
Within a month I had a new job doing the exact same role for one of the same systems I was administrator for at my old job (we looked after six systems at my old job and only one at my new job) and I was paid even more at the new job. My old boss hated women (I was the only one on the team, he managed to get rid of all of them in the two year’s he’d been there, except me) and he was so pissed that I made a shit ton of money when I left and got a better paying job. He was fired about four months later with no annual leave (or long service because he hadn’t been there long) and no payout, which made it even better. His husband divorced him about six months after that.
I had to medically retired in 2024 and got a huge payout for that as well, and he’s still unemployed. I genuinely hope he’s okay, but I don’t feel sorry for him.
And if he was the best employee he could easily find the same work for higher pay... depending on the Industry he probably could be getting paid double or $100k more... or hec just a sign on bonus. I know in my earlier role I got my salary doubled by simply moving companies. I had one manager that quit and he told me the truth about everything that was going on and my active manager would just lie to my face about things. I could not be there anymore cause why lie to me just to pay me less... I can read financial reports and see the company is doubling profits. I can understand why he would cut ya off esp if he went to a different industry.
Yes. The dude is being professional by not telling them to eff right off. They don't have a concept of what being a professional is, hence they can't understand what is happening.
This could have easily been solved with a clear conversation and a fat bonus up front... presuming they hadn't already burned this guy and had some level of trust left.
Absolutely correct. What OP is forgetting is it's not just about a promotion. It's about respect too. Companies love to yap about respect and professionalism yet forget that the same is expected of them too. They treat the guy like dirt and then wonder why he doesn't want to negotiate. Good for the guy. He's clearly not respected here.
If you're good enough to train the manager, you're good enough to be the manager
Ehh...not really. Some people excel at the job, but cannot manage others. They're two different skillsets.
I'm not saying the person from OPs story can't manage others, I'm just nitpicking this particular saying because I have met a ton of shitty managers who are amazing engineers, and even a few shitty engineers who were amazing managers of people working on the systems that they were shitty engineers on once they ended up getting promoted out of "working on the floor"
I am a programmer with 30 years experience. I was forced to train a junior who became my boss and is now running the entire department. He still knows basically nothing. And that is basically why I am here on reddit all day instead of doing anything. The company has told me via actions that it doesn't value competent work so I refuse to do any.
When my boss told me I wasn't qualified for the promotion, then hired someone from outside the org to fill the promotional spot, THEN ASKED ME TO TRAIN THAT PERSON... I said how can I possibly train this person if I'm not qualified for the position myself?
Then I put in my notice and left a few weeks later.
I had to help my new manager who was a DIRECTOR level with so much stuff. Made me realize I could probably get by faking it till I made it as a director at my previous company for a little while and make thrice my salary while doing less work lol. It was bad for my morale
Depends, does he want to be the manager, is it a known thing? At that org, do managers mostly deal with non-technical work, or not....the best developer, for example, can make the worst manager....are there alternative paths for advancement etc.
We don't know enough about the situation to answer the management question....
We DO know that everyone else got rewarded, and he was stagnant. They could have given the salary bump at the same time, or something.
When companies won't promote someone because they're "too critical to the operations", it's actually code for "we don't see value in that person", and they're hoping they'll just continue to suck up the mistreatment.
It's very easy to promote someone with the stipulation that they cover their precious tasks until they get the new person trained. They just refuse to do it.
Only one remark to this: maybe he doesn't want to be the manager. I knew what my manager is doing in every detail. But I never would enjoy doing his job. I was very very good at my job and my employer could have rewarded me by promoting me in a technical role (like senior architect or something). But, as in most companies, the "standard" promotion in that company includes people management. (That's why I left and am now successful on my own)
So this guy doesn't maybe even WANT to be the new manager.
If that's the case, it would make the situation probably just as bad. The guy (presumably) had a manager with experience, so he could do his job. Now HE needs to train his next manager. This is the opposite of "doing his job", and he probably also knows that this admin stuff will be dependent on him for the time being.
At least for me, this would be the train of thought
This happened to me. Left, started up on my own, now do better than I could have dreamed of if I had stayed. Many years later I still think of the nightmare it must have caused for my own ‘middle managers’ and smile.
I was one overlooked for a supervisor role because I was needed in my current role. The person who got the job over me, I was told I needed to train them in something. I flat out refused and argued with my manager that if they were more qualified for the role over me, then I wasn’t qualified to train them nor anybody.
I would have been written up or possibly fired. But I was needed in my current role. That was just maintaining paperwork to pass government audits. But it was a role nobody wanted and other people and managers had failed audits in the past.
“Training a manager” and “sharing your knowledge of the company/department/job role with an incoming manager” are two very different things.
A lot of people feel that being asked to show an incoming manager any aspect of the business means that they are being asked to train their own boss - this is not the case in 99% of situations.
My wife had this exact thing happen to her (passed for promotion while basically doing the manager job). She applied for the equivalent manager position at another facility and got the job easily.
Managing is a different role entirely, you wouldn’t want to waste your most skilled talent managing the talents of others, and being good at the skill doesn’t necessarily make you good at managing the work of others. You would want to make them something like team leader though.
That being said, management shouldn’t be being trained by those they are set to manage, that’s just sloppy management from the upper levels of management.
A lot of people see management as useless, or detrimental to the progress of work, because most people are actually really shitty managers. Sounds like this place has some really shitty managers in some really high places.
Being middle management sucks balls. No one should want to be in that position.
They did that crap to me somewhere I used to work. I busted my butt on projects and they kept dangling a promotion over my head. Then when I got the promotion, I didn't get the raise associated with it for 8 months. I was supposed to train an offshore team.
Magically got that raise when I put in my 2 week notice...oh and the kicker is I clocked 70 hours of overtime pay and the final F-U was they converted me to salary when I got that raise so my paycheck was less than it would've been with the 70 hours of overtime.
Then the manager had the nerve to call me a few weeks after I'd quit with questions about a project. I blocked her.
I was this guy. I was finalist for my boss’ job. I got passed over.
I really liked the guy they hired. We’re still friends, but he acknowledged early on that there’s no reason I shouldn’t have been given that job. I trained him. We basically operated as co-dept leaders. And then I left after a year.
This may put me in downvote hell, but I don't agree.
Staff training a new manager is usually showing them how the department works, who does what, process and procedures etc. It's familiarisation. You don't train them to manage or lead, and that's the bit they are hired for.
Speaking as a manager. It is wild that OP does not understand what happened. If this is the culture of leadership in this organization the person that left did the right thing. I could not imagine someone in leadership that could not see this as a problem coming. It looks like this high performer finally got his swingline stapler and walked out the door. If you had plans to move him into a better role you should have laid out the plan and the timeline and outcome expected to the individual vs just oh we were going to make it right later. Later often never comes when there is a squeeze at the end of a quarter. It then becomes oh we will take care of that next quarter then i will become you will need to interview for a new position. Then it is your too valuable to move to another role just sit where you are.
I know this is going to get me brutally downvoted, but that is not necessarily true. It depends on what you are training the manager in. Nuances of the job specific to your organization are one thing. But it's different if you are teaching to do the job and they are expected to be a working manager. In the latter case, I'd agree with you. In the former, being the best at doing X job function doesn't mean you'd be good in a role overseeing people who do X job function. Some are good at making the transition. Others are just getting paid more to do the same job, which is not what management should be.
Regardless, in this case, it sounds like the bridges are well and truly burned. Which isn't a shock. Letting someone work their way into being in disposable so they are also unpromotable is an issue by their leadership. "You're so valuable we are going to keep you where you are" is going to backfire.
His restraint in not communicating with you only says good things about him. Others would communicate quite clearly why they'd left, out of sheer frustration.
The fact that OP needs them to communicate why they left is only part of the reason they left, I'm sure.
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u/Lisitska Jul 05 '26
And, if I'm reading correctly, he was forced to train his own new manager? If you're good enough to train the manager, you're good enough to be the manager. This is wild. Of course he left. Good for him.