What Your Experience Never Tested

Promotion changes what a person must judge, and sometimes removes the feedback that taught them to judge well.

At 131 US firms, the salespeople with stronger sales records were more likely to become managers. Among those promoted, however, stronger previous sales were associated with a smaller estimated contribution to their subordinates’ sales. The record that helped someone get the appointment pointed in the opposite direction when researchers examined performance in the new job.

The finding does not mean that selling well causes someone to manage badly. Firms may accept candidates with weaker managerial prospects because their sales are exceptional. Promotion can also reward effort and preserve incentives, making the decision more complicated than a simple hiring error. What the study exposes is a problem with the evidence: achievement in one role can acquire authority over a different role before its relevance has been established (Benson, Li, & Shue, 2019). academic.oup.com

Joey O’Connell, a fundraising executive manager, offers a revealing distinction. His confidence when knocking on doors rests on years of signups he can recall. A bad management decision can still unsettle him; he wonders whether he has done that work long enough. This is a useful description of someone learning where his experience applies. A promotion can expand responsibility much faster than it expands the history of decisions from which reliable judgement develops.

What practice was able to teach

Experience teaches through the relationship between what someone notices, what they do and what follows. In their examination of intuitive expertise, Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein identified two important conditions: an environment containing dependable patterns, and an opportunity to learn them through practice and feedback. A cue must have some stable relationship with an outcome; feedback then allows a practitioner to correct mistaken interpretations. When that feedback is rapid and clear, the connection is easier to learn. Repeating a task whose outcomes are misleading or difficult to interpret may instead consolidate a habit without establishing its accuracy.

This helps explain why competence can vary within a profession. Someone may recognise a familiar problem accurately while making unreliable predictions about its long-term consequences. Kahneman and Klein call this fractionated expertise. A job title groups responsibilities together; the learning behind them may be very uneven. The feeling of confidence cannot reliably tell us which judgement belongs to which category (Kahneman & Klein, 2009). bear.warrington.ufl.edu

Even within fundraising, the feedback needs interpretation. At a door, a fundraiser can repeatedly observe whether a conversation reaches its immediate objective. O’Connell distinguishes securing a signup from ensuring that a donor understands the continuing commitment. A quick yes is evidence about one outcome. Whether the donation lasts requires a different observation. The measure available first may leave an important part of the work untested.

Management makes attribution harder still. If an office improves after a coaching conversation, the improvement could reflect the conversation or a change in territory. If performance falls, useful coaching may have been overwhelmed by another constraint. These are possibilities, not findings about O’Connell’s business. They show why gaining more managerial experience need not automatically produce clearer managerial knowledge. The person has to discover what the outcome is actually telling them.

Borrowing the role

There is an awkward consequence: someone must begin doing unfamiliar work before they possess the experience to feel fully entitled to do it. O’Connell describes studying effective colleagues and using a rule he calls “copy, paste and adapt”. He also treats the executive title as a cue to assume broader responsibility. These practices can give a newcomer something concrete to try.

Research on professional transitions gives this an intelligible shape. In a qualitative study of 34 consultants and investment bankers, Herminia Ibarra described people observing role models, trying out ways of behaving, and evaluating them against their own standards and others’ responses. She called these experiments provisional selves: attempts to bridge existing abilities and an unfamiliar role. The study developed an account of adaptation; it did not establish that imitation causes better managerial performance (Ibarra, 1999). web.mit.edu

The word provisional matters. Borrowing a senior colleague’s way of asking questions creates an opportunity to learn how it works. Deciding that this is simply how successful managers behave can close that opportunity. A brief question may be sufficient for a veteran fundraiser who recognises what the manager means. The same question may leave a novice guessing. Adapting the wording to one’s personality would leave that difference untouched.

There is also a problem with whom we copy. Jerker Denrell’s analysis of organisational learning shows how observing survivors while overlooking failures can make risky practices appear effective even when they have no advantage in the full population. Success stories can supply a distorted sample of what works (Denrell, 2003). Organization Science Applied to role models, this suggests asking what conditions made the behaviour useful, rather than treating the visible behaviour as the explanation for success.

Giving judgement somewhere to learn

For a specific decision, a useful question is: What experience would have taught me to make this particular judgement? Familiarity with a business is relevant, but it cannot settle every decision inside it. Knowing how to persuade a donor, for instance, gives a manager useful material for coaching. It does not establish how quickly a particular colleague can learn, or whether the support offered has reached them in a usable form.

O’Connell’s insistence on exhausting support before ending a working relationship makes that distinction important. A manager can remember every conversation they offered and still have incomplete evidence about what the employee understood. Their authority complicates the check: agreement from someone whose prospects they influence offers limited evidence that the advice was understood. Reassurance from a trusted colleague can help the manager feel able to proceed. Seeing the employee explain the donation would provide more direct evidence of what they understood.

A manager who states what coaching should change can examine whether that change occurs. If coaching is intended to change how a fundraiser explains an ongoing donation, that behaviour can be examined before the next weekly total arrives. An improvement in signups alone would leave the intended change uncertain. Such observations can inform a decision without turning the whole managerial task into a clean experiment.

Some decisions remain difficult to evaluate, and an organisation cannot wait for certainty before assigning responsibility. But its account of the appointment matters. If past achievement is presented as proof of readiness for every new responsibility, the appointee inherits an expectation of having answers. The questions they most need to ask may now be the ones that appear to undermine the reason they were chosen.

References

Benson, A., Li, D., & Shue, K. (2019). Promotions and the Peter Principle. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 134(4), 2085–2134. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjz022

Denrell, J. (2003). Vicarious learning, undersampling of failure, and the myths of management. Organization Science, 14(3), 227–243. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.14.2.227.15164

Ibarra, H. (1999). Provisional selves: Experimenting with image and identity in professional adaptation. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(4), 764–791. https://doi.org/10.2307/2667055

Kahneman, D., & Klein, G. (2009). Conditions for intuitive expertise: A failure to disagree. American Psychologist, 64(6), 515–526. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0016755