Why Leadership Promotion Needs to Become a HR-Led System, Not a Managerial Reward

Summary

Many organisations still promote using an old-fashioned, performance-reward model: do well, be visible, earn trust and get a promotion. That logic is brittle in today’s complex, global organisations. Swiss Butter, an international restaurant group, found that instinct-led promotion and manager discretion didn’t scale across countries and cultures.

Rather than tinkering with training, Swiss Butter replaced the promotion rulebook with a HR-led leadership operating model governed by one clear principle: no promotion unless two conditions are met at the same time. First, the candidate must already be doing most of the role above them. Second, they must have trained someone to take over the majority of their current responsibilities. Promotion becomes evidence of organisational readiness, not just individual success.

HR also leads hiring and mobility, prioritising values over pedigree, and deliberately uses cross-market assignments as part of development. The result: visible readiness, less internal politicking, and leadership continuity designed into the system rather than reliant on individuals.

Key Points

Traditional performance-led promotion elevates high performers before they’re ready, creating fragile leadership layers.
Swiss Butter introduced a HR-led leadership operating model to make promotion conditional and systemic.
Two mandatory promotion conditions: the person already performs most duties of the higher role; and they have trained a successor for their current role.
Succession becomes an operational requirement, not a future plan; knowledge hoarding is actively discouraged.
HR-led hiring focuses on values alignment over pedigree, with skills considered trainable but judgement and integrity not.
International mobility is used as deliberate leadership development to build resilient, cross-market capability.
The model shifts impact from culture to structure: readiness is visible, politics reduce, and growth becomes less person-dependent.

Why should I read this?

Short version: if your promotions still look like the old “do a good job and hope for the best” playbook, this is worth five minutes. It shows a practical, HR-led alternative that forces succession to happen before someone moves up, so gaps don’t blow up when you grow. For HR teams wrestling with scale, cross-border consistency or leadership churn, the article gives a simple rule-set you can actually adopt rather than just admire.