A common mistake companies make is to confuse technical success with management/leadership potential. There are technical masters who should stay in that lane, and the reward for that mastery might better come in the form of compensation rather than promotion.
Being a manager requires different skill sets than non-management roles. Promoting employees to manager positions based on their performance, rather than their strengths, can be a recipe for disaster and set them up for failure.
I’ve taught thousands of foremen over the years, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had someone lament they wish they’d never been promoted or that they could ‘go back.’ And I will ask: ‘Why don’t you?’ And the answer, almost universally, is: ‘I need the money.’
So you have a performer who loves the technical work but hates his or her promotion to the managerial/leadership role and feels stuck. Who wins? No one.
Take a moment to think before rewarding someone’s excellence or talent with a management/leadership role. Consider who the individual is and what he or she sees as the best use of their skills or his or her career aspiration. Then, marry that with how to best reward him or her. The employee and the organization will benefit.
