Loyalty isn’t leadership
Promoting your longest-serving people feels fair. Until everything lands back on your desk.
A few years ago, when Miquel got in touch with me, he was running a manufacturing company with revenues of close to €10 million. It was just starting to feel the pains of growing too fast: only five years earlier, it had been hovering around €3 million. The symptom was obvious. Everything went through him, even though he had promoted his longest-serving people (the production manager, the accountant and his best salesperson) to Operations Director, Finance Director and Sales Director. All of them were great professionals, keen to do their best.
The problem was that he was asking them for decisions they weren't ready to make, so anything important ended up back with him. And since the company had tripled in size, that meant far more work than before. The result? He became the bottleneck of his own company. Growing any further felt impossible, and just holding steady was wearing him down.
On top of that, he watched peers in his sector grow faster while living calmer lives, and that frustrated him even more, because he had done the right thing: he had rewarded loyalty with more responsibility.
There was only one difference. The companies starting to pull ahead of his had hired real executives. While he was the only one making the big decisions in his business, his competitors had several people doing it, setting a pace he couldn't match. All he had to do was break the bottleneck and become a company that could decide on its own, thanks to people who genuinely know how to make important decisions and accept the risk and responsibility that come with them.
Easier said than done, right?
The people who got you here aren't always the ones who will get you where you want to go. More often than not, it's the other way around.
Want to reward a good accountant by promoting them to Finance Director? First, think about what you want from a Finance Director. Then assess, on your own or with them, whether they can become one and what they would need to get there. I'm not against the promotion. I'm against it being automatic, or earned simply by having been there first.
Miquel trained his accountant to become a solid Finance Director, and he has risen to the challenge. For operations, he brought in someone new and, fortunately, the production manager accepted it (not without some grumbling). But things don't always end well. When he tried to do the same with sales, the Sales Director decided he didn't want to go back to selling, and left.
We already know what happens when you get this right, but it's worth repeating: the company stops going through you. Important decisions get made without waiting for you, because you have people who decide, not just people who execute. You get your head and your time back for what only you can do, and the company grows at the pace you were unknowingly holding back. In short, you stop being a one-man band and start leading a company that no longer needs you to move.
How many of this week's important decisions would have been made if you weren't there?
© Oriol López Villena 2026