Developing and promoting the right people: What is happening in your organization?

Failure to recognize the combination of unique skill sets (by position and by level) can derail a carefully planned reorganization or promising career. Obviously, technical skills are critically important for first level management, but not so important at the top levels of management. People and conceptual skills dominant the needs list at the executive level. Placing unskilled people into new management positions might be all right if the critical competencies and skills were identified and the newly promoted people developed to improve them. Research, however, shows that is not what is happening.