The Battlefield Promotion
A Leadership Pathology
A battlefield promotion (or field promotion) is an advancement in military rank that occurs while deployed in combat. A standard field promotion is advancement from current rank to the next higher rank; a "jump-step" promotion is advancement from current rank to a rank above the next highest.1
Every experienced leader has seen this: you hear about a promotion that makes no sense. Not questionable. Nonsensical. Someone with three years of experience and mediocre IC performance suddenly managing a team. No process, no announcement, just a quiet org chart update.
This is the battlefield promotion. It happens when a key person leaves, panic sets in, and leadership makes the expedient choice instead of the right one. It’s organizational malpractice disguised as pragmatism.
Consider this scenario. You’ve probably seen some version of it:
Jane: Hey John, did you hear about Jack's promotion?
John: Huh? What do you mean? It's not promo season.
Jane: Well, after Jenny resigned last week, they promoted Jack into her role as the team's software development manager.
John: Wait a sec. Jack's a level 2 engineer with 3, maybe 4, years of work experience! I thought the manager track was level 4. Not to mention that he wasn't a particularly strong engineer. How's that make any sense?
Jane: I don't know... there wasn't an announcement. Guess you have to be in the right place and time to get promoted here... 🤷🏼
John: 🤬 My shields are down.
We instinctively recoil at this because it violates basic organizational fairness. One instance might be a fluke. When it becomes a pattern, it’s a symptom of deep dysfunction. As Donella Meadows observed, “Purposes are deduced from behavior, not from rhetoric or stated goals.”2 Repeated battlefield promotions reveal an organization’s true purpose: stability at any cost, including the cost of integrity.
Why Leaders Do This
The battlefield promotion is weak leadership, not clever problem-solving. It’s driven by predictable pressures:
The vacuum fallacy. A key person leaves, creating a void that triggers panic. Instead of running a proper search, leadership rushes to fill the role; any warm body will do. The goal isn’t finding the best leader. It’s having someone, anyone, in place to restore the appearance of order.
Path of least resistance. A proper hiring process is work. Define the role, source candidates, run rigorous interviews, make a difficult decision. Promoting the person already there is easy. It’s an expedient shortcut that trades the team’s future for the manager’s present comfort.
No succession planning. Healthy organizations constantly identify and develop future leaders. Battlefield promotions signal this work hasn’t been done. There’s no bench strength, forcing reactive, desperate decisions.
Loyalty over competence. In toxic environments, battlefield promotions reward relationships rather than capability. The “Jack” in our scenario is often someone’s protégé or a “founder bro” whose primary qualification is proximity to power. This transforms a mistake into deliberate cultural corruption.
The Ripple Effects
The immediate damage is obvious: an unqualified person in a role they’re not ready for. The secondary and tertiary effects are worse. A single battlefield promotion is a virus that spreads through the organization.
Trust evaporates. The message to everyone else: your performance doesn’t matter. What matters is being in the right place at the right time or knowing the right people. Why strive for excellence when rewards are distributed arbitrarily?
The career ladder becomes fiction. All those carefully defined levels and competencies? Theater. High performers get cynical and disengaged. The politically savvy learn that the real game isn’t impact, it’s alignment and visibility.
Your best people leave. The ones who value fairness and have options elsewhere; they’re gone. This creates a downward spiral. The talent pool concentrates with people who either can’t leave or are willing to play politics.
Incompetence gets normalized. The promoted individual, now operating beyond their capabilities, will likely struggle. To protect themselves, they surround themselves with loyalists or weaker performers. Their presence lowers the bar for what leadership looks like. This is the Peter Principle in action, but accelerated.
The Antidote
Preventing battlefield promotions requires systemic discipline; choosing principle over convenience. Not a single fix, but a reinforcing system.
Transparent, calibrated promotion processes. Promotions should happen on a predictable cadence, judged by a calibrated committee against clearly articulated criteria. Any off-cycle promotion must face the same scrutiny and require a higher burden of proof. Make the bar explicit: what specific evidence demonstrates this person is ready for this level?
Robust succession planning. Every leader should be able to answer “Who are your potential successors?” This should be a standard question in leadership reviews. If the answer is “I don’t know” or “Nobody,” that’s a problem that needs immediate attention.
Interim leadership as default. When a leader departs, appoint a qualified interim, often a senior IC or a leader from an adjacent team. This stabilizes the team without making a rash long-term commitment. It buys time to run a proper search for a permanent replacement.
Leadership courage. Ultimately, the antidote is courage. The courage to withstand the discomfort of a leadership vacuum. The courage to have a difficult conversation with a loyal but unqualified employee about why they’re not ready. The courage to prioritize long-term team health over short-term org chart aesthetics.
What It Reveals
A battlefield promotion is never just one bad decision. It’s a referendum on organizational character. It reveals whether a company is committed to its stated principles or if those principles are negotiable when convenience demands it.
I’ve seen organizations recover from battlefield promotions, usually by quietly course-correcting within 6-12 months, often through a “restructure” that undoes the damage. But the trust lost in that period doesn’t come back easily. People remember. They remember who got promoted and why. They remember that fairness was sacrificed for expediency.
Healthy organizations play the long game. They understand that the integrity of their promotion process is foundational to their culture. They refuse to sacrifice it, even when a role sits empty for months. Because they know that the cost of getting it wrong (in lost trust, departed talent, and normalized dysfunction) far exceeds the discomfort of an extended search.
“Battlefield Promotion.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 5 May 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlefield_promotion
Meadows, Donella. Thinking in Systems: A Primer. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008.