Good morning,

Have you ever seen a stellar employee get promoted into a management position and just … flail? And, despite everyone’s best efforts to get them extra training and candid feedback, it becomes clear that the role simply doesn’t play to their strengths.

It can be tricky to figure out who will flourish as a manager, because the skills that make someone an excellent individual contributor do not always translate to leading teams. Today we’ll hear from Carter Cast, a clinical professor of strategy, about which specific skills leaders should look for in new managers and how they can screen for that during the interview process.

How to Promote the Right People into Management

Cast, the former CEO of Walmart.com, has seen good and bad managers in action, both those who worked for him and those who managed him earlier in his career.

He points to three skills to look for when promoting someone into a management role, which he discusses in this episode of The Insightful Leader podcast.

Self-awareness: Cast defines this as “Are they clear about what they’re good at, what they stink at and what their triggers are, where their vulnerabilities are?” To suss this out during interviews, Cast suggests specific questions such as: “Give me an honest assessment of your strengths and weaknesses and vulnerabilities. And tell me how you make adaptations at work accordingly.” And, “tell me about a time that you failed and tell me what you learned about it from a personal standpoint.”

Can they let go: You want to avoid the “solo flier,” Cast says, meaning someone who is really good at diving in and working on their own, but can’t relinquish any of that control. These employees, he says, end up, “overmanaging, micromanaging, giving out tasks instead of explaining the strategy. … They never teach their subordinates how to fish. They try to fish for them.” Cast says you want to screen for people who understand when to step back and let a team member do their thing versus when an employee needs a manager’s hands-on help.

Listening skills: Good managers are good listeners who ensure that their employees feel heard, Cast says. To screen for this in interviews, Cast suggests giving the candidate a hypothetical scenario where one of their employees has refused to get on board with a team project. How would they handle this? You want to hear something along the lines of, “Tell me more about why you can’t support this. I want to understand this better,” Cast says. You want to hear “clarifying questions that summarize what the employee is telling them and then the manager tries to solve it. What you don’t want to hear is that “they immediately get defensive and say, ‘well, you have to support us, it’s in the budget!’”

In the second half of the podcast, Cast gives advice for what to do with stellar employees who are not interested in becoming managers but who still want to advance in their careers. We’ll cover that in a future newsletter.

Even Cringeworthy Failures Make Us Stronger

“Failure sucks. There’s no other way to put it. It’s terrible, but it’s a necessary, normal part to success if you’re ambitious. It’s a sign that you are trying to achieve something great.” So says Nicola Bianchi, an assistant professor of strategy, in this fun video about how even Kellogg professors can fail pretty spectacularly. It was produced by the student organization The Good Life, whose mission is to help students ask “what does my best life look like” and take steps to live it.

Here’s a story from finance professor Mitchell Petersen, who was struggling to publish papers early in his career. “I went to see a senior faculty member who I considered to be a mentor and I asked for advice. He was direct. He told me my work was subpar. It’s not that I didn’t deserve tenure at his university. I didn’t deserve tenure anywhere.” Ouch! Petersen handled this by, first, listening to his wife’s advice to breathe and not make any rash decisions, and second by building his network of senior faculty members at other universities, who eventually helped him get his job at Kellogg.

I’ll let you hear clinical associate professor Suzanne Muchin’s extremely cringeworthy story of failure directly from her in the video.

If you want to share your own story of failing miserably—and how you handled it—please write us at insight@kellogg.northwestern.edu, and let us know if it’s OK to publish your tale in a future newsletter. You can stay anonymous if you’d like.