There is a version of this story that plays out in a lot of mission-driven organizations.
Someone is doing really good work. They know their cases, they know the program, people trust them, and they care deeply about the clients and communities the organization serves. When a supervisor or manager position opens up, they are often the natural choice.
And honestly, they may be exactly the right person for the job.
The problem is that being a great attorney and being a great manager are not the same thing. We don't always acknowledge how significant that transition actually is.
One day, you are responsible for your own cases and your own work. The next, you are responsible for helping other people do their work well. You are suddenly having conversations about performance, figuring out what to delegate, trying to support someone who is struggling, making decisions that affect an entire team, and sometimes telling someone something they really do not want to hear.
Meanwhile, you are probably still carrying some of your own caseload.
We have both seen how easy it is for new managers to feel like they are supposed to already know how to do all of this.
They don't.
Most people don't.
The promotion is not the problem.
We are not suggesting that organizations should stop promoting strong practitioners into leadership. Some of the best leaders we know started exactly this way.
What matters is what happens after the promotion.
Too often, an organization recognizes that someone is ready for more responsibility and gives them a new title, a larger workload, and maybe a management training somewhere along the way. Then everyone gets back to work.
Except the new manager's work has fundamentally changed.
They may be trying to supervise people who used to be their peers. They may be figuring out how much autonomy to give someone and when to step in. They may know exactly how they would handle a problem themselves, but are now learning that their job is not necessarily to solve it for the person in front of them.
And sometimes the hardest part is realizing that the thing that made them such a successful attorney can actually get in the way.
If you are used to being the person who knows the answer, it can be incredibly difficult to sit with someone who is struggling and let them work through the problem. If you are used to being dependable by taking on whatever needs to get done, delegation can feel like letting people down. If you have built your reputation on getting things right, giving someone else room to make a mistake can be uncomfortable.
None of that means you are a bad manager.
It means you are learning how to lead.
Organizations have a role in that transition too.
We sometimes talk about leadership development as though it is something an individual employee needs to take responsibility for. But managers don't operate in a vacuum.
If roles are unclear, no amount of management training is going to completely fix the problem.
If every decision still has to go through the executive director, new managers cannot actually learn to lead.
If a supervisor is carrying a full caseload while managing a team, it may not be a personal time-management problem. The role itself may need to be redesigned.
And if an organization has never really defined what it expects from its managers, it is difficult to know whether someone is succeeding.
That is why we think leadership development and organizational design are so connected.
Sometimes the person needs new skills. Sometimes the organization needs better structures.
Usually, it is some combination of both.
Give people room to become leaders.
Good managers do not appear fully formed when they receive a new title.
They become better through experience, reflection, feedback, and having people they can turn to when something gets complicated.
That might mean giving a new supervisor a place to talk through a difficult personnel issue before it becomes a crisis. It might mean helping them think about what they should continue doing themselves and what they need to let go of. It might mean being explicit about what decisions belong to them, what needs to be shared, and what should be escalated.
It also means accepting that leadership will look different from person to person.
We do not need every manager to lead the same way. We do need them to understand what their role is, what their team needs from them, and how their leadership fits into the larger organization.
The goal is not to take a great attorney and turn them into a completely different person.
It is to help that person grow into a different kind of responsibility without losing the qualities that made them valuable in the first place.
Because sometimes the best person to lead the next chapter really is the person who has been doing the work all along.
They just need the support, structure, and space to learn how to lead it.