The Not So Breakfast Show
Listen, laugh and learn as we share our latest thoughts about staying relevant, contemporary leadership and doing life right. Ish Cheyne is the Head of Fitness in New Zealand for global fitness juggernaut Les Mills. Sacha Coburn is the COO of Coffee Culture, a leading group of boutique coffee shops, and the co-founder of The Company You Keep.co.nz.
The Not So Breakfast Show
Congratulations, You’re the Manager. Sorry About Your Life.
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Episode 270
This episode is about one of the most common promotion traps at work: taking the person who is brilliant at doing the job and assuming they’ll naturally be brilliant at leading everyone else who does it.
Ish and Sacha unpack why technical excellence and leadership ability are two very different things, why promotion has become the default way organisations reward high performers, and what can go wrong when somebody moves from doing the work to enabling other people to do great work.
They talk about paying your stars more instead of automatically giving them people to manage, testing internal candidates against the external market, looking for openness to feedback, and dealing with the awkward truth that the skill or behaviour you ignore now will probably become a much bigger problem later.
There’s also a lost Australian gig and a moment of silence for money never earned. Sacha discovering that relief can tell you quite a lot about the work you actually want to do, and a late recommendation for a TV series involving manipulated CCTV footage. Naturally.
Key Learnings
1. Being brilliant at the work doesn’t automatically make you brilliant at leading it
2. Promotion shouldn’t be the only way to reward great people
3. Leadership means shifting from “me” to “you”
4. Look for people who are hungry for feedback
5. Don’t hire internally just because it’s convenient