What I Looked For When I Decided Who Got Promoted

The first person I ever promoted to shift manager was the best crew member I had. I'll call him Marcus. Fastest on the line, never late, numbers that made my district manager nod when he walked the store. In my second week he told me he wanted my job someday. I believed him. I liked him for saying it out loud.

Six weeks after I promoted him, two of my best people quit. Both told me the same thing on the way out, in nearly the same words. He's great at the work. He just doesn't care who's doing it with him.

That one was on me, not Marcus. I promoted the thing I could measure. I heard his ambition and mistook it for readiness.

We had the conversation a week later. I moved him back to lead on the line, kept his pay bump, and told him plainly the mistake was mine. He was relieved, which surprised me more than anything. He'd wanted the title because it was the next rung, and nobody, me included, had asked whether he wanted what that rung actually involved. He was the best line lead I ever had. He was just never going to be the person who noticed the new dishwasher hadn't eaten all shift.

Most of what gets written about ambition in Christian circles asks whether it's okay to want more. From the other side of the desk, I learned that's rarely the question that decides anything. The question I ended up asking about every person I considered after Marcus was simpler and a lot harder to fake: what does this person want the bigger job for?

My mistake wasn't unusual. Gallup's State of the American Manager research found that companies choose the wrong person for the manager's role 82% of the time. When Gallup asked managers why they thought they'd been picked, the most common answers were success in a previous job that didn't involve managing anyone, or simply time served. Put plainly, most promotions reward being good at the old job. Very few check what the person wants the new one for.

So here's what I started watching for instead. None of it showed up on a scorecard.

I watched how people treated the job they already had, especially the parts nobody graded. Who restocked the walk-in at close without being asked. Who covered a Saturday for somebody whose kid was sick and never mentioned it at review time. Ambition that only switches on when someone is keeping score is ambition for the score. I didn't need more of that on a management team. I already had a district manager watching the numbers.

I paid attention to the first question people asked when I brought the promotion up. Marcus's first question had been what it paid. A few years later I sat down with a young woman I'll call Denise and asked if she'd ever thought about running a shift. Her first question was, "Who would I be responsible for?" I want to be careful here, because the money question isn't a bad question. Denise had rent too, and she asked about pay a minute later. But the order told me something. One of them was looking at the job and seeing what it would give them. The other was looking at the job and seeing the people in it. Denise ran nights for me for three years. Her crew had the lowest turnover in the district, and I don't think she ever looked at that number on purpose.

I watched what people did with credit and blame. After a rough Friday rush, the kind where ticket times blew past twenty minutes and a table walked out, I'd pull everybody together for five minutes at close. Some people told me what went wrong at the grill. Some told me what went wrong with them. The ones who could say "I got buried on expo and didn't call for help" without flinching were the ones I trusted with a crew. A manager spends most of the job owning things that weren't technically their fault. Somebody who can't own their own mistakes doesn't suddenly start owning everyone else's when you hand them a set of keys.

The flip side mattered too. When a shift went well, who said "we"? I don't mean the polished "we" people learn for interviews. I mean the unguarded one at eleven at night, when everybody's mopping and nobody is performing for anybody.

And I noticed that some of the people I most wanted to promote weren't asking at all. They'd talk themselves out of it before I could finish the sentence. "I don't know if I'm the right person." Those were usually the same people everyone else already went to when the fryer went down or a customer started yelling. The crew had promoted them years ago. They just hadn't noticed. For a long time I read their hesitation as humility and left them alone. I don't anymore, and I want to spend all of next week's post on why.

I didn't have language for any of this until seminary. Then I hit 1 Timothy 3:1, and it stopped me: "If a man desire the office of a bishop, he desireth a good work."

Paul doesn't scold the wanting. He calls it good. What surprised me was what comes right after. The list of qualifications is almost entirely about how the man already handles what's in his hands: his household, his temper, his reputation with people outside the church. Paul's test for the larger responsibility is the smaller one he's already carrying. Jesus says the same thing as a plain observation in Luke 16:10: "He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much."

Further down that same list, Paul adds a line I skipped past for years. Deacons are to "first be proved" (1 Timothy 3:10). Tested, over time, before the title. A few verses before that, he warns against putting a new convert in charge, "lest being lifted up with pride he fall" (3:6). Paul isn't worried that ambitious people will want the job. He's worried about what the job does to someone who hasn't carried weight long enough to know what it costs. That was Marcus. If I'm honest, at twenty-something with my first set of store keys, that was me too.

That's what I was fumbling toward in a back office with a stack of availability sheets. I just didn't know it had a verse attached.

These days, when someone sits across from me as their minister and asks whether their ambition is from God, I catch myself asking the same thing I used to ask across a manager's desk. I don't start with whether you want it. Wanting it is allowed. I ask what you're doing with what's already been handed to you, and who's better off if you get more.

I'll be honest that this isn't a clean test, and I don't want to pretend it is. I've promoted people with the right heart who struggled in the role anyway. I've watched people who wanted a title for all the wrong reasons grow into it and become the kind of manager I'd work for. A couple of the best shift leads I ever had wanted the raise first and learned to care about their crew somewhere along the way. God seems to use mixed motives a lot more than I'd like, and I say that as someone whose own motives have rarely been pure on the first pass.

So I don't think the goal is to scrub your ambition until it's spotless before you're allowed to act on it. I think the goal is to know what it's pointed at. Ambition aimed at the people and the work tends to get stronger under a bigger load. Ambition aimed only at the title usually gets exposed by it, the way Marcus's did, and the way mine has more than once.

If you're the one hoping for the next job, you can run this test on yourself before anyone else does. It isn't comfortable. Think back over the last month and name something you did at work that no one will ever bring up in a review. If nothing comes to mind, sit with that for a minute. Then think about the people who work beside you and ask whether any of them would be glad, actually glad and not just polite, to hear you got promoted. You don't have to announce the answer to anybody. You do have to be honest about it with yourself and with God, because whoever makes the call at work is mostly guessing, and He isn't.

If someone on the other side of the desk were deciding about you this week, what would they see in how you're carrying the job you already have?

And what do you actually want the next one for?

Contact

Reach out to faithfront for support

Email

Phone

hello@faithfront.com

+1 (870) 518-9356

© 2026. All rights reserved.