The Promotion

Promotion decisions fail in two directions: you promote the wrong person into a role they can't do, or you pass over the right person and lose them. The harder error to catch is the first — because the person being promoted is usually excellent at their current job, and it feels disloyal to doubt them. But a role is a job description, not a reward. The question is never "who deserves this?" It is "who can do this job?" Those two questions have different answers more often than managers want to admit.