Rotate People Before You Promote Them

Your best backend engineer just got promoted to director. Last month she owned the payments service and knew every corner of it. This month she owns payments, the mobile apps, the data team, and support escalations. She has never shipped a mobile release, and she has never sat with a support lead while an angry customer explains, for the third time, why the export is broken.

She is smart, and she will learn. In the meantime she will make decisions about all four teams, and three of them will be made from a dashboard.

Plenty of companies do this every promotion cycle. They take the person who is best at the job they have and give them authority over jobs they have never done. Then they send that person to a two-day leadership course and call it development.

Who Is Ready to Decide for Others?

Every promotion answers an old question: who is ready to make decisions about other people’s work?

We answer it by asking who is best at their own work, which is a fair question and a different one. Being the best engineer on the payments team tells you she has depth in payments. It tells you very little about how she will judge a mobile team’s estimate, or whether she will notice when the data team is drowning.

The two Greeks who thought hardest about who should rule both saw this mistake coming.

What Aristotle and Plato Saw

In Book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle makes an observation that stings a little. Young people, he says, become excellent at geometry and mathematics. Nobody thinks a young person has phronesis, the practical wisdom to judge what to do in a real situation.

His reason is simple. Mathematics works from general principles that a sharp mind can grasp quickly. Practical wisdom deals with particulars: this team, this deadline, this person who is struggling. Particulars become familiar through empeiria, experience built up from many direct encounters. A young person lacks experience, Aristotle says, because experience takes time to build.

Swap “young” for “new to that part of the business” and you have the director problem. Your backend engineer is brilliant in the mathematical sense. She can learn the principles of any system in a week. What she lacks is the pile of particulars that tells a leader what a team’s real problem is when the numbers look fine.

Plato goes further in his Republic. In Book VII he designs an education for the people who will eventually run the city. They study for years. Then, at about thirty-five, instead of taking power, they go back “down into the cave,” his image for the ordinary world of public life, to hold junior posts in war and government for fifteen years. They gain experience, and they are tested to see whether they hold steady when they are pulled in every direction. Only after that, around fifty, do they lead.

Fifteen years is extreme, and the order matters more than the length. Plato would not let his best students rule on brains alone. He made them hold real offices first, ones where they could fail in public. He was also clear about whom the arrangement served. The trainees went back because the city needed rulers who knew its daily life. Experience collected for a résumé comes in short stints that leave each team a little worse off. Plato’s version kept people in each post long enough to own a result for the people who would later live under their decisions.

The Inside View Is What the Promotion Skips

A rotation, as I mean it here, is a stint of owning a real result in an unfamiliar part of the business, long enough that it can fail. What it gives a future leader is the inside view: what a normal Tuesday on that team feels like.

You can see a lot from outside. The dashboard shows cycle time, incident count, and backlog, and none of it shows what the work costs. It does not show that the mobile team loses two days every release waiting on app store review, or that the support lead is the only person who knows which customers are about to churn. The data team’s “on track” may mean that two people are working weekends to keep it that way.

Only a leader who has worked inside the team knows what those numbers leave out.

The damage shows up quickly. The new director overrides the mobile team’s estimate because it looks padded compared to backend work. The team pushes back once, loses, and learns its lesson. From then on they manage the director instead of telling her the truth. They report what she wants to see and route around her when it matters. Nobody planned that; it grows out of a promotion that handed over authority before knowledge.

I wrote earlier this year about how the loudest person in the room keeps getting promoted. That piece covers who gets picked, and this one covers what they should have done before anyone picked them.

What Rotation Looks Like When It Works

Dana McNabb’s path at General Mills is a clear example of the pattern, though one career cannot prove it. She joined the company in Canada in 1999. Over the next two decades she ran global marketing for Cereal Partners Worldwide, led the U.S. cereal business, served as group president for Europe and Australia, and took on chief strategy and growth officer. Then she ran North America Retail. In June 2026 she became chief operating officer, responsible for every operating segment in the company.

What stands out is how many times she was put in charge of a result she had never produced before: a new country, a new category, a new region, a whole-company strategy. Running a business unit or a region means owning results that can go wrong in public. By the time she oversaw the whole operation, there were very few parts of it she had only seen on a slide.

Most rotation programs skip the owning part. They send people to shadow the support team for a week, which shows them the queue and teaches them little about running it. A real rotation hands over the queue for a quarter with the escalation count under that person’s name, the way Plato’s trainees held actual commands in the army.

Rotation is also cheaper today than it has ever been, at least in software. When I drop into an unfamiliar codebase now, I open it with an agent and start asking it questions. Within a few days I can ship a real change. A backend engineer can spend a quarter owning a mobile feature and be useful by week two. The ramp that used to make rotation expensive has mostly gone away, so cost is no longer a good reason to skip it.

The fair objection is specialists. Some people should go deep and stay deep. A great staff engineer who wants to spend ten years on the database is a gift, and you should not force them through the support queue to earn respect. Rotation is for the people who are about to make decisions about other people’s work. If the next step is a title with authority over teams they have never worked on, the rotation comes first.

Range alone does not make a good leader either. Plenty of executives have rotated through five divisions and still lead badly. Aristotle tied practical wisdom to good character as well as experience, and a rotation is how you get to watch character under a load the person has never carried. That is why the practice below grades how someone handles the miss, more than the number itself.

How to Run Job Rotation Before a Promotion

A fifteen-year program is out of reach for most companies. One honest list and one real assignment will get you most of the way.

List the gaps before the promotion. Write down every team or function the person will make decisions about after the promotion. Mark each one where they have owned something real. The unmarked ones are where their judgment is borrowed.

Hand them one gap for a full quarter. Pick the unmarked area where a bad call would hurt most. Give them ownership of a real result there, with a number that can go red. Keep a strong person beside them who knows the area, so the team does not pay for the training.

Grade the miss. Some of these quarters will go badly. That is useful information. Watch what they do when the number goes red. Do they ask the team, or do they defend the plan? Do they change their mind in public? A person who learns fast from a miss in unfamiliar work is ready for more of it. Watch closely if they explain it away instead, because that is how they will handle every miss once they have the title.

Make the ramp cheap. Give them the access, the agents, and the people they need to get useful quickly. A rotation that spends eight weeks waiting on permissions teaches nothing except patience.

If you want the title, ask for the ugly assignment. Volunteer for the team nobody wants: support, operations, the legacy system, the on-call rotation everyone dreads. Those are the places where the inside view is hardest to get and most worth having.

Some of you already have the title and never got the range. Getting the order wrong does not cancel the duty to know the work. You owe the teams the particulars a rotation would have given you, so go collect them, and until you have them, let the people who do that work make the calls you are not yet equipped to make.

When it is time to hand over the role, the same principle applies. A successor who has owned results across the business still needs room to lead, which is why your successor can’t lead while you’re still in the room.

Final Thoughts

A promotion gives someone authority over work, and only experience in that work lets them use the authority well. When the order is reversed, the new leader spends their first year making decisions from dashboards while the teams learn to manage them.

Aristotle said practical wisdom grows from particulars that take time to collect, and Plato sent his best students back into ordinary jobs before he let them rule. General Mills did a version of the same thing with its future COO. Put people in charge of results they can miss, in parts of the business they have never seen, before you put them in charge of the people who do that work every day.

If you want to build leaders who have owned the hard parts of the business before they lead them, MasteryLab is where that happens.

FAQ

Should you promote your best engineer to manager?

Being the best engineer on one team shows depth in one kind of work. A manager or director decides about many kinds of work, most of which that engineer has never done. Before the promotion, give them ownership of an unfamiliar result for a full quarter, with a number they can miss. Promote the ones who learn fast from the miss.

What is job rotation in leadership development?

Job rotation moves a future leader through real roles in different parts of the business before they get a senior title. The rotation only counts when the person owns a result in each role and can fail at it. Shadowing, job tours, and classroom courses do not build the same judgment.

What did Aristotle say about experience and practical wisdom?

In Book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle notes that young people can become excellent at geometry and mathematics, but are not thought to have practical wisdom. Practical wisdom deals with particular situations, and particulars become familiar through experience, which only builds up over time.

What does empeiria mean?

empeiria is the Greek word for experience: knowledge built up from many direct encounters with real situations. Aristotle treats it as the ground that practical judgment grows from. A person with empeiria recognizes what a situation calls for because they have met many like it.