Perspective
Promoting your best engineer into management is not always right
Technology leadership
The best individual contributor on a technical team is not automatically the right person to lead it. The skills that make someone an excellent engineer, deep technical focus, comfort with complexity, preference for independent work, do not always translate into the skills that make someone an effective engineering manager. Companies that promote without assessing for leadership capability often lose a great engineer and gain an ineffective manager simultaneously. The more productive question before promoting is what the person actually wants and whether the role is set up for someone at that stage of their development.
Further reading · CIO.com
7 Standout CIO Skills
This is the kind of problem I help companies work through.
If you know you need senior technology leadership but a full-time hire is more than the role needs, that is the conversation.
I work as a fractional CIO or CTO for companies that need senior technology leadership without a full-time hire.