“Deep vs Wide”
I had a top salesperson in our industrial sales business. A true rockstar. She would sell more than double the next best salesperson month after month. So, what did I do? I promoted her to sales manager. I figured she would be more valuable in teaching all my salespeople how to sell like she did. Result? She was a terrible manager. Also, once she had the position of manager, she did not want to move back to being a salesperson. We parted ways within 12 months.
I learned a valuable lesson last week from Mark Brooks and it is the difference between an Individual Contributor and a Manager.
Individual Contributors are vertical players in your organization. They have deep knowledge and expertise in their area. They are usually excellent at what they do. They are the type of person you find yourself saying, “If I only had 10 of John/Jane we could triple this company.”
Managers are horizontal players in your organization. They manage people. They need to understand the intricacies and motivations of their team members. They understand various parts of the business and they interact and affect one another.
Where problems arise is when we promote individual contributors into management positions. We expect an expert in an area to be able to replicate that expertise across a broad number of people. But they are 2 totally different positions. Vertical versus Horizontal. If you do not spend a good amount of time training an individual contributor on how to be a manager, you are more than likely setting yourself up for failure.