#165 | The Promotion Nobody Prepared Them For

In this solo episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Aleksandra Lemanska takes on a transition that happens constantly in tech - and almost always without the support it actually requires: promoting your best engineer to team lead, tech lead, or principal engineer.

The pattern is familiar. Six months after the promotion, the engineer is frustrated, the team is frustrated, and the person who was your most reliable individual contributor has become your most complicated leadership problem. They're still heads-down executing, ignoring everything else the new role requires - or if you're that engineer, you're working harder than ever, uncertain whether you're doing it right, unsure who to even ask.

Alex starts with the question nobody asks out loud: what did nobody tell them about this new job? The job description lies. A principal engineer or tech lead sounds like a more senior version of the previous role. It isn't. It is a categorically different role, and the skills that made someone exceptional before - speed, precision, independent depth of work - can actively work against them now.

If you've recently promoted someone or are thinking about doing it, this episode is the conversation that should happen before the announcement.


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