Backfilling

On a building site, ‘backfilling’ means to refill an excavated hole with the material dug out of it. I think it makes a good analogy for what happens in an organisation when promotions aren’t well planned. We create the need to “backfill” when we promote someone without preparing their successor. What happens next? The newly promoted manager is stretched like a rubber band and snapped back into their old job to fix problems while trying to learn the new one.

To continue the analogy, this means that the surface of the organogram looks level, but underneath everything is unstable.

Backfilling usually starts with good intentions and poor design. We elevate the best operator, assume talent will transfer, and forget that roles are ecosystems. They require institutional knowledge about processes, relationships, tacit knowledge, and decision rights. When successors are dropped in without preparation, the promotee will be pulled into “quick questions”, escalations, and quiet clean-up. Two jobs, one title.

Working as I do in organisational culture change, I can spot backfilling by its symptoms. Decisions stall unless the old hand attends the meeting. Customers notice variable quality. Calendars bulge with shadow work. The promotee’s development plan slips to “when things calm down”, which of course they never do. Energy drains, resentment grows, capacity remains thin, and the organisation slows.

This isn’t about blaming successors. We set them up. The root causes are predictable: no succession map, unclear documentation of the role, fuzzy handover dates, unclear decision rights, and little coaching. We treat promotion as an event, not a programme.

How can we fix this? By intentionally designing a process. Name the successor and identify one understudy. Publish a crisp handover checklist: stakeholders, cadences, decisions, risks, and the first five deliverables. Run a protected overlap: four weeks of shadowing, two weeks of reverse shadowing, then a two-week no-touch period where the promotee refuses legacy fixes but redirects instead.

Give the successor early authority for one visible decision, owned end-to-end. Celebrate early wins; correct quietly but quickly. Measure what matters. Track escalation rate, time-to-competence, and predecessor involvement hours. If the promotee spends more than ten percent of their time on the old role after week six, pause and intervene. Recognise successful transitions publicly; they are culture moments.

The aim of promotion is not to fill a vacancy. It is to expand capacity. When we design transitions intentionally, the promotee grows into the new role, the successor earns confidence quickly, and the organisation compounds capability instead of shovelling the same soil back into yesterday’s hole. Stop backfilling. Build the team, honour the handover, and move the enterprise forward together.