The promotion you didn’t want: when the system moves you past your own wishes

“You know you can’t say no. Who else would it be, if not you?”

The director said it kindly, almost like a father, with the kind of warmth you cannot turn down without seeming ungrateful. The head of the department was leaving, you had been there the longest, and everyone knew you were the one who could find things when nobody else could. Colleagues congratulated you before you had even decided. At home a bottle of wine was opened. And somewhere among all the congratulations you noticed that nobody had asked whether you actually wanted this. Worse still: you had not asked yourself either.

A promotion counts as good news. Little is said about the fact that it can also hurt, mostly because saying so sounds ungrateful. Who would complain about a higher salary, a new title and the trust of management? Yet when I talk with people who have been moved into a post they never sought, I hear the same thing again and again: a sense that something was decided about them, not with them. In this post I will try to explain why this happens, why a workplace is so much like a family in this respect, and what you can do if you find yourself in this position, whether before you say yes or after you already have.

The best at your job, so moved somewhere else

The most common route to a management post is simple: someone is excellent at what they do, so they are promoted into something else. The best nurse becomes the head nurse, the best programmer becomes team lead, the best teacher becomes head teacher. The logic seems unassailable: who could lead better than the person who knows the work best?

The trouble is that leading is a different profession. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull described this half satirically in their 1969 book The Peter Principle: in a hierarchy, everyone rises to the level at which they are no longer successful, because they are chosen for promotion on the basis of how well they did in their previous role. For a long time this was taken as witty exaggeration. In 2019, however, economists Alan Benson, Danielle Li and Kelly Shue analysed data on salespeople across hundreds of companies and showed that the pattern really does appear: the most successful salespeople were more likely to be promoted to manager, and their teams then did worse on average than the teams of managers who had been chosen differently.

Gallup, too, in its 2015 report on the state of managers in the United States, estimated that companies fail to choose the candidate with the right talent for management in 82 per cent of cases. The figure is one research firm’s estimate, not a law of nature, but it says something many people know from experience: a promotion often rewards past work rather than predicting how a person will fare in the new post.

I want to be careful here. The Peter principle is often misused as a jibe: “they’ve promoted someone to their level of incompetence again.” That is not my point. I am not saying you will be a poor manager. I am saying that success in one role is no proof that you will want another role or enjoy it. Ability and desire are two different questions. The system usually asks only the first.

A workplace is a system, and a system needs its roles filled

In relational family therapy, which I am training in, we see the family as a system: a whole in which everyone has a role and in which a change in one person moves everyone else. You will find a short explanation in the knowledge base under the family as a system. In the 1980s the rabbi and family therapist Edwin Friedman showed that the same rules apply to other communities too: congregations, schools, companies. There, as well, you find roles, alliances, triangles and a shared drive to restore balance as quickly as possible after every disturbance.

When a manager leaves, a gap opens in the system. The gap creates anxiety, both in management, who must appoint someone, and among colleagues, who do not know who will arrive. The quickest way for a system to get rid of that anxiety is to fill the gap with someone it already knows and can rely on. That is often the person who has always been dependable, has never caused trouble and has always said yes.

If this sounds familiar, it is no accident. In families this person has a name: the hero, the child who makes sure everything is fine, who causes no trouble and whom everyone relies on. I wrote about this in Roles in the family: the hero, the scapegoat, the invisible child. Which was yours?. People who played this role at home often bring it to work. And the system recognises it. When something needs filling, every eye turns to them, and saying no is almost impossible for them, because it would mean turning down, for the first time, the role that gave them their place in the group.

Two truths at once: ambivalence

People who have been promoted without wanting it often expect to know what they feel. They don’t. They feel pride and sadness, gratitude and anger, relief at being noticed and dread at being noticed now of all times. This state has a name in psychology: ambivalence, experiencing opposite feelings about the same thing at the same time.

Ambivalence is not a flaw of judgement, nor a sign that you “don’t know what you want”. William Miller and Stephen Rollnick, the authors of motivational interviewing, describe it as an entirely ordinary state before any important change. The trouble only begins when one side is pushed down. The people around you usually help push down the sadness (“but it’s great, what’s wrong?”) and you are left alone with a part of yourself you are not allowed to talk about.

I often notice that the side which has been pushed down comes back in another form: as sleeplessness before Monday, as irritability at home, as sudden tiredness that does not match the amount of work. Sometimes the body says before the mind does that something has happened which you did not choose.

Losing work you loved

A promotion is almost always a loss as well. A nurse who becomes head nurse spends less time with patients. A programmer who becomes a manager writes less code and more email. A teacher who becomes head teacher no longer stands in front of a class. The very thing that made them good, and the reason they chose the profession in the first place, gives way to spreadsheets, meetings and other people’s conflicts.

Linda Hill of Harvard described in her study of new managers, published in the book Becoming a Manager, how surprised they were by this. They expected more control and freedom and found instead that they depended more on others. They expected to go on being “experts”, but they had to become someone else. Hill describes this as a transformation of identity, not as the acquisition of new skills.

There is no room to grieve a loss that comes with a pay rise. Nobody sends condolences to someone who has just been given a better post. Losses like this are known in the field as disenfranchised grief; there is more about it in The grief nobody acknowledges: miscarriage, divorce, losing a job. It may sound excessive to grieve for work you still do in the same building. But you have lost something real: everyday contact with what gave you meaning, and belonging to a group of equals.

That second loss is often more painful than the first. Yesterday’s colleagues are today the people you appraise. At the coffee machine the conversation falls quiet when you walk up. You are no longer one of them, and you are not yet at home among the managers. There is more on how your relationship with former colleagues changes in Managing for the first time: how your relationship with former colleagues changes.

When you tell them at home that you are not happy

One of the hardest points is the conversation with your partner or family. At home a promotion is often genuinely good news: more money, fewer worries, pride. When you say you are not looking forward to it, they may not understand, or they may fear you are about to throw away something that benefits the family. A conversation like this might go as follows (a composite, not a real person):

“I don’t understand. You waited years for them to notice you.”
“I waited for them to notice how good my work is. Not to move me away from it.”
“But the salary…”
“I know. That’s why I said yes. I just don’t want to pretend I’m happy.”
“Then tell me what hurts most about it. I won’t tell you you’re exaggerating.”

Something important happened there: his partner did not start solving the decision, she made room for the sadness. That is often all a person needs so as not to be left stretched between two worlds: work, where they must be grateful, and home, where they must be glad. If there is no such room at home, that is sometimes the first reason a person looks for it elsewhere, including in therapy.

Exercise: whose wish is this?

This exercise helps you separate what the system expects of you from what you want. You can do it today, with a pencil and half an hour of quiet.

1. Write down all the voices. Who wants you to accept (or keep) the new post? Management, colleagues, your partner, your parents, yourself ten years ago? Next to each, write one sentence that voice says.
2. Next to each voice, write what it serves. For management, filling the gap. For your partner, fewer money worries. For you ten years ago, proving you are worth something.
3. Write your own sentence, without “I must” or “it would be right”. What would you want if there were nobody to be disappointed? If you don’t know, write what you would not miss and what you would.
4. Find what is most precious to you in your old work. Not the job as a whole, but one concrete activity: a conversation with a patient, untangling a tricky bug, the moment a pupil understands.
5. Ask whether it can be kept. Not as all or nothing, but as one day a week, one project, one mentoring role. Negotiation is often possible, but only if you know what is essential for you.

The personal values list in the knowledge base can help with this exercise too: it often turns out that the promotion does not clash with your values in general, only with one of them, which happens to be central for you.

What you can do once you have already said yes

Many people in this position have already made the decision, and stepping down is not a realistic option. That is not a defeat. A few things can make a difference:

• Name the loss, at least to yourself. “I miss working with people” is not ingratitude, it is a fact. What is named simmers less quietly.
• Don’t take the role entirely as it was handed to you. Managers often have more room than they think to shape the work their own way: keeping part of the specialist work, passing on administrative tasks, choosing a mentor.
• State your conditions. If you find it hard to say what you need, Assertiveness: how to say what you want without aggression or apology may help.
• Give yourself a beginner’s time. Linda Hill observed that new managers need longer than they allow themselves before they feel at home in the new role. You are not a bad manager because you are still not at ease after three months.
• Watch out for the old role. If you were always the one who could manage everything, as a manager you will take everything on yourself too. That is one of the main reasons why it is the most responsible and reliable people who burn out.

If the change of post involves a new contract or changed working conditions, get general advice on your rights from a trade union or a lawyer who works in employment law. That is not a psychological question and I cannot answer it, but it is often part of feeling less trapped.

When you have decided you don’t want it

Some people come to realise that they really do not want the new post, or that they will not keep it. In many settings this is harder than the promotion itself. Going back to your previous post can be read as failure, refusing as disloyalty, leaving as betrayal.

This is exactly where the systemic view helps. When the system pushes you to stay, that is not necessarily proof that your decision is wrong. Often it is proof that your decision causes anxiety in the system which someone else does not want to carry. Friedman would say this is a moment of differentiation: you stay connected to people, but you do not decide according to their anxiety.

If you are even thinking of leaving the company, the questions in Should I quit my job? Questions that tell you more than a list of pros and cons may help.

When discomfort is not a sign that it isn’t for you

It would be unfair of me not to tell the other side as well. Not every reluctance to be promoted is wisdom.

Sometimes reluctance is fear of growth. Every new role is uncomfortable at first, because you are no longer good at it. People used to being excellent sometimes mistake this discomfort for a sign that they are “unsuited to it”. If, faced with the new post, what you mostly hear is a voice saying “you’ll be found out”, it is worth reading Impostor syndrome: why successful people doubt themselves. In that case the answer is not refusal but time and support.

Sometimes the decision is economic. Not everyone can afford to turn down a higher salary. If the new post is the only way for the family to get through the month, the question “what do I want” is a different one, and you do not deserve judgement for choosing security. Then the task is different: how to keep as much of yourself as possible in a post you did not choose.

Sometimes people come to love managing. Hill described this too: after the initial crisis, many of her new managers discovered that leading gave them something they had not known before, the satisfaction of watching others grow. Ambivalence at the start does not predict misery. It only predicts that the transition will take time.

And sometimes the distress has nothing to do with work. If you have not been sleeping for a while, have no drive, or feel that nothing makes sense, this goes beyond the question of promotion. Then talk to your GP; in acute distress, the Klic v duševni stiski helpline in Slovenia is available at night on 01 520 99 00 (7 pm to 7 am), and the Samaritans helpline in Slovenia (Zaupni telefon Samarijan) around the clock on 116 123.

What your own story says about this

When I explore with people why it was so hard for them to say no, we almost always arrive at the family. Who at home was the one who must not disappoint? How did your parents talk about work, success and “those who stayed in the same place”? Did someone in the family get promoted and then fall ill, or never dare to try?

These questions are not about finding someone to blame. They are about seeing which expectations you have brought with you, and which of them are really yours. If you are curious how such patterns weave through the generations, a good place to start can be a longer session with a genogram, A Look into the Past, where we draw your family together and look at which roles and stories about work kept repeating in it. I also work with English-speaking clients in Ljubljana.

What to remember

• Success in one job is no proof that you will want or enjoy another: ability and desire are two separate questions.
• A workplace works as a system: when a gap opens, it is filled fastest by the person who has always said yes.
• Pride and sadness about a promotion can exist side by side: ambivalence is not a flaw in the decision.
• A promotion is often also a loss: of work you loved and of a group of equals. You are allowed to name it.
• Not all reluctance is wisdom: sometimes it is fear of growth, sometimes economic necessity, and telling them apart is part of the work.