I read Petronilla Serebwa’s article entitled, why incompetent get promoted and the competent are let go, in The Standard, February, 19, 2025, with a lot of interest.
Serebwa, a Human Resources specialist, observed that a significant number of employers promote some of their staff to managerial and leadership positions based on the technical performance when they ought not to.
“Such promotions take place even though the competencies of such employees are based on their technical prowess and not on their ability to lead and manage others,” the writer noted.
She attributed the phenomenon to the Peter Principle—a situation where an otherwise competent person is moved to a higher position in an organization and suddenly finds himself unable to effectively perform the duties in that position.
This is the crux of the matter. There is a big distinction between technical competence and managerial or leadership competence.
The lower and middle ranks in an organisation mainly require technical skills or abilities. Recruitment into these ranks is based on basic or technical skills people—often young people possess—thanks to their education and or training.
In general, therefore, technical abilities are more important at these levels. Employees at these levels work under the supervision or guidance of a person, more often, a person who previously worked at that level before elevation.
Postions higher than these may require either more depth or breadth of the technical skills, and experience. Impliedly, the officer should have gained some managerial and leadership skills through mentorship and modelling.
It therefore means that to qualify for these higher levels, an employee must, at the irreducible minimum, have two things: technical, and experience. These two are however not enough in the long run.
Supervisory positions require both technical competence and managerial skills. although a person may have learned some management skills through observation and modelling, this is not enough to fly. Hence the role of training of employees due for promotions on leadership levels, the writer rightly specified in the article.
However, with the greatest possible respect for the writer, training in itself, doesn’t mean that the people an employer is elevating to higher positions is fit to manage or lead others.
Real preparation for management and leadership is a lifetime process. It is a journey that perhaps starts from home, to school to entry into an institution other than the family.
First, the basic education experiences the employees had, prior to higher education and training sufficiently developed their minds and character. Quality education successfully develops in the learners the mental and character orientation that provides the basis for training into a given technical field.
Second, post-secondary studies the employees had were rigorous, coherent and practical. That whatever the studies each of them had, they helped them gain important qualities of mind that lay the foundations needed for productive and innovative lives. These qualities are rigour, critical reasoning, problem solving, efficacy, imagination, and creativity and communications skills.
Additionally, the studies should also have helped the employees gain some ethical capacities, respect for and, in the final analysis, understanding, and appreciation for human diversity.
Third, the employers or its leadership should have nurtured a strong organisational culture. The culture should have clear vision, purpose and values and which celebrates individuality, originality, risk taking, innovation and entrepreneurship.
Fourth, the organisation should be that which allows people in management or leadership positions to exercise management and leadership role appropriate to those positions. Some organisations promote people to management and leadership positions but tie them to substantially similar work they did one or two ranks below.
Fifth, the institution must have a strong induction programme for newly recruited employees should be inducted first before they start working. For young and straight from college or school, the induction will exorcise the undesirable habits they might have developed during their students’ years. The induction programme will reorient employees entering the organisation to the organisation culture of the organisation and shed off whatever habits they had internalised from previous employers.
This is important for nurturing and creating synergy between old employees and incoming employees.
Sixth, the training programmes aimed at preparing employees for supervisory, management and leadership positions should be rigorous and coherent. It should have depth and breadth. Poorly designed programmes don’t nurture the high-level thinking, visioning, and organisational skills that leaders require. Nor can they help nurture the emotional intelligence that ignites loyalty, action and sacrifice in the followers or subordinates whenever occasion demands.
Leadership is more than training. It is about education and the training of the mind in the laws of human nature. Leadership is leading people. You ought to know what attracts them as well as what revolts them. The DNA of their humanness and not employees at task.
Leadership is about influence. It is about rallying significant others behind a cause. It is about creating causes and rallying people around them. It is getting people through storms, or breaking those storms and giving the reasons why.
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Some of the greatest leaders had a rigorous and coherent leadership education and training. it didn’t just happen. Martin Luther King, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Nelson Mandela. Former President Mwai Kibaki, John Michuki, the late Simon Nyachae.
The environment in which institutions must work and achieve their goals and purposes is in constant agitation. That world of leadership is messy, noise and, if not properly handled, has casualties. It needs tact, adroitness. In other words, leadership.
The man with impeccable technical capabilities without leadership capacities is a liability to the organisation. He can be a source of real mess, noise and casualties. The mess, noise and casualties are reflected in low employee morale, industrial strife, low production, losses in profits, stagnant profit margins, turnover of staff, job losses, loss of market and many others.
This is the reason why a lot of thinking ought to go into whom to promote or not promote. The good leader deploys the skillsets at his disposal to achieve desired results. The bad one scatters the skills to the four winds.
Strategic thinking must guide what to include or exclude particularly for programmes aimed at preparing middle level staff for leadership positions five or six hence.
By Kennedy Buhere
Communication Specialist
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