Why Leadership Promotion Needs to Become a HR-Led System, Not a Managerial Reward
For all the language around modern leadership, most organisations still promote people using a logic that would feel familiar to an HR team in the mid-twentieth century. Perform well in your role, stay visible, earn the trust of the right people, and progression tends to follow. Authority is treated as a reward for performance, and leadership is assumed to arrive once the title changes.
What has changed is not the model, but the consequences of getting it wrong.
As organisations become more global, flatter, and operationally complex, performance-led promotion creates fragile leadership layers. High performers are elevated before they are ready. Succession planning exists in theory but rarely as a lived system. Knowledge concentrates around individuals instead of processes, and gaps only become visible when growth exposes them.
Too often, HR is left managing the impact of these decisions rather than designing the conditions that prevent them.
This was a tension Eddy Massaad founder of international restaurant group Swiss Butter, encountered early in the company’s expansion. As the business grew across multiple countries and cultures, it became clear that instinct-led promotion and informal leadership development would not protect consistency. What worked in one location or with one manager did not scale across borders.
Rather than refining existing frameworks, Eddy questioned the underlying logic of promotion itself. What if leadership progression was not about recognising individual performance, but about demonstrating organisational readiness? And what if HR-led systems, rather than managerial discretion, governed advancement?
The result was what Swiss Butter now refers to internally as a leadership operating model rather than a development programme. At its core is a simple but demanding rule that applies to every promotion decision.
No one progresses unless two conditions are met simultaneously.
First, the individual must already be performing the majority of the responsibilities of the role above them. Leadership readiness is demonstrated before promotion, not tested after it. This shifts risk away from post-promotion remediation and places emphasis on observable capability.
Second, and more significantly from an HR perspective, the individual must have successfully trained someone beneath them to perform the majority of their current role. Advancement is only possible if capability has been built below. Succession stops being a future plan and becomes an operational requirement.
This second condition is where the model breaks most sharply from traditional promotion logic. Leadership progression ceases to be a personal achievement and becomes evidence of system strength. Knowledge hoarding becomes counterproductive. Development becomes non-negotiable.
The impact is structural rather than cultural. Leadership gaps shrink because readiness is visible. Internal politics reduce because criteria are explicit. Growth becomes less dependent on individuals and more resilient by design.
Swiss Butter reinforces this approach through HR-led hiring and mobility decisions. Values alignment is prioritised over pedigree, based on the belief that skills can be taught, but judgement and integrity cannot. Once inside the organisation, progression is mapped deliberately, with the assumption of longevity rather than churn.
Leaders are also expected to operate across multiple countries as part of their development. Opening or supporting a location in a market where language and norms may be unfamiliar is treated as leadership education rather than disruption. HR’s role is to structure, support, and normalise these experiences so they build capability rather than burnout.
Over time, this has created multiple generations of leadership within the same markets. Leaders train successors, who go on to train successors of their own. Regions operate independently not because of charismatic individuals, but because continuity is designed into the system.
What Swiss Butter demonstrates is not a better training programme, but a challenge to the promotion models many HR functions have inherited rather than designed. In an era defined by complexity, leadership frameworks built for industrial-age hierarchy are increasingly unfit for purpose.
The question for HR is no longer whether leadership needs to change. It is whether HR is willing to take ownership of leadership design from first principles, rather than continuing to manage the consequences of a system that no longer works.
If leadership is infrastructure, HR must be its architect.
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