The skills that make someone exceptional at execution — speed, precision, technical mastery, the ability to get things done — are not the same skills that make someone exceptional at leading others.

Promoting your best performer into a leadership role without examining whether they have the capacity for the different work of leadership is one of the most common and most costly mistakes in the restaurant business. You lose a great employee. You gain a struggling manager. And the team that was counting on real leadership gets neither.

Leadership is a different skill set. It has to be identified, developed, and coached — not assumed. The question to ask before any promotion isn't "are they good at the job?" It's "are they good at developing the people who do the job?" Those are different questions. They almost never have the same answer.