Good footballers do not always make good football managers
This piece was originally shared on LinkedIn in response to recurring conversations with founders and leadership teams around this topic.
I’m publishing it here as part of an ongoing body of thinking around restaurant strategy, market entry, and operational decision-making.
It is a cliché because it keeps proving true, and hospitality makes the same mistake all the time.
The promotion errors I see most often are not about talent. They are about assuming that doing one job well means someone will naturally thrive in the next one.
Every move up changes the role.
Operator → Supervisor → Manager → Multi-site → Exec
Each move pulls someone further from the work that made them good and closer to something they've never done before. More people to lead, more decisions to make and less of what they loved.
Chefs spending more time in meetings than in the kitchen, strong operators buried in reporting or technical experts talking to boards instead of doing the work they're brilliant at.
If you rush that move because someone is performing well, has been around long enough or is pushing hard for it, you're not really helping anybody.
If it goes wrong, you now have a gap where they were, and someone unhappy where you moved them.
It becomes a short-term solution that creates a long-term problem.
The better conversation happens before the promotion. Clarity about what the role involves, what's going to change for them and whether that's genuinely what they want.
Sometimes the answer is not yet. Sometimes it's not at all.
Since first sharing this, I’ve seen the same issue surface repeatedly — particularly with businesses entering new markets or scaling too quickly. The underlying challenge is rarely strategy itself, but how early decisions constrain execution later.
Andrew Jobes is the founder of Jobes & Co., a Dubai-based advisory working with restaurant and hospitality businesses across the Middle East and international markets.