Some engineers that I promoted are now principal and distinguished engineers. They are better at engineering than I ever was. Some managers that I promoted are now directors at Amazon, vice presidents and senior vice presidents at companies like Paramount, and C-level leaders at smaller ones. Some have better management titles than I ever did. None of them were better than me on the day I promoted them, at least not at the thing I was promoting them into, but they were better at something that mattered, and I bet they would grow into the rest. Making that bet is the job of a leader, and when it pays off, the person you bet on surpasses you.
The conventional wisdom on being surpassed by those you cultivated is to be gracious. This is true, and also not very helpful. Being surpassed isn’t a single event that can be handled correctly with a smile and a kind word; it is a continuous process. People pass each other in pieces.
I have been the one to do the passing and the one to get passed. I learned so much more from being passed.
It usually works like this:
You invested in someone. You gave them the hard assignment, defended them when it went sideways, wrote the promotion document, and took the meeting that got them noticed. And then it worked. They are now, by some number the company prints, ahead of you.
Your honest reaction is mixed, and the mix is not flattering. There is real pleasure, the kind a teacher feels, knowing that you helped them grow. But there is also a small, cold recalculation: if they are ahead, where exactly am I?
Even for people who don’t put too much stock in visibility or recognition, seeing someone else achieve higher levels of trust and impact can tickle uncomfortable parts of the ego.
Here is what I have come to believe about why this happens, after years of watching it and now coaching people through it:
Mentees pass us because they are better than us in some way that happens to match a specific opportunity. They aren’t better in general. They are simply better at the specific thing the moment called for.
I do not think there is a way to skip the cold and unflattering ego response, but I do think there is a way to hold it, name it, and put it down. The alternative is becoming the senior person who starts to withhold the hard assignment, argue that the promotion is premature, and stay ahead by making sure nobody below them moves up. You become the leader who uses the high ground to keep others down below. I have watched that happen to more people than I would have expected.
Now, the view from the other side. Most of us have done some passing of our own.
I grew up in Akron, Ohio. My father had been a farm kid, then a welder, laid off three times in those years and always walking into another shop the same day to ask if they were hiring. When he married my mother, he moved into accounting, and for the whole of my childhood he ran the books at Yoder Brothers in Barberton, the world’s largest grower of chrysanthemums. He was proud to walk us through the greenhouses, and our yard had hundreds of mums in it most years, sometimes more, because he planted them for us.
My mother sold Tupperware well enough to earn a company car, and the two of them sold cookware in strangers’ kitchens. My mother cooked the dinner, and my father followed up to close. They both had some college; my father went to Ohio State and did not finish, for reasons I realize I never asked him.
They did not get rich. They owned their home and raised five children, and they taught us that life is not fair and you get on with it, mostly by getting on with it in front of us.
I was fortunate. I got into an exceptional college and landed in a field that barely existed at the time, and then grew faster than almost anything in the history of work. Somewhere in my thirties, without ceremony, I passed my parents in title and in wealth. By the time I was a vice president at a company whose name they recognized, the gap in those two measures was wide enough that I could feel it on every visit home. I had no idea what to do with that feeling.
Here is what the feeling was, when I finally looked at it. Guilt, first, and an awkwardness about what I could now afford to do for them, and about whether offering it would land as generosity or as a reminder. And underneath both, a question I did not like finding in myself: did more title, more money, more scope make me better than them?
The answer is absolutely not. But I want to be precise about why, because “of course not” is just a polite truism, and the polite version never holds up under pressure.
The real reason that it doesn’t make me better than them is this:
I passed them in two measures: title and wealth. I never passed my mother in loquacious energy or bounding, rushing love for her family. I never will. I never passed my father in raw work ethic or in the practical, daily problem-solving that kept a household of seven running. Those were the measures that made their lives what they were, and on those scoreboards I will forever be behind. I had the starting line they built, a level head and frugal spirit that they gave me, and a house to go home to if the risk I was taking failed. The two numbers I out-earned them by are, in a real sense, numbers they produced.
It took me a while to realize this, but there is a reason this realization arrives late. It is worth saying out loud so nobody reading this thinks their lateness was a personal failing.
We are built to discount our parents somewhere between thirteen and twenty-five, which is exactly the window in which their knowledge would help most. Then we spend our thirties rediscovering how much they knew. That is biology and society doing something inconvenient, not a character flaw. But it means the years when you most need a mentor’s judgment are the years you are least able to hear it. By the time you can hear it, you may have passed them in every visible measure and have to work out how to keep learning from someone you have, on paper, outpaced.
That is the hard part of being the “passer,” and it is the part I want to hand to anyone recently promoted past the person who taught them. You will be tempted to stop learning from them, because the numbers say you are ahead. But remember, the numbers are measuring few things out of many. The person who taught you still knows how to do the things they taught you, and there are many things they never got around to teaching you. The grace required of the mentee is to keep honoring someone whose numbers and title you now exceed. Most people fail that test.
I see the whole exchange most clearly now from a third seat, which is watching my children.
My daughter passed me years ago in anything medical; I cannot stand the sight of blood, and she handles it without blinking. She passed me in the ability to learn detailed information and hold onto it. And she is now a mother, which is a measure I will never be on at all. My sons have already passed anything I ever did in physical fitness and in raw passion to succeed. They also regularly surpass me in something I have never been good at, which is connecting with strangers. All three will pass me in many other ways, and I expect it, and when it happens, it will not make them better than me in some grand or conclusive way. It will mean they were better at something that matched an opportunity, and they took it, and that somewhere behind them was a starting line somebody built. I hope they notice who built it a little sooner than I did.
To be fair to myself, the exchange runs both ways, and it hasn’t stopped. The people who passed me in engineering and in title are, most of them, still at it, and I have quietly passed a number of them in things that didn’t used to count: coaching, travel, the making of a proper cocktail. I’ve even learned some ukulele. Retirement turned out to be a change of scoreboard, not an end to keeping score, and I intend to keep adding columns.
So the question for anyone being surpassed is not whether you can bear it. You have no choice. The question is whether you can keep being generous with the tools and knowledge that will let it happen. And the question for anyone doing the passing is simpler and harder: on the measures where you passed them, did you notice who got you to the line? And have you told them?
I am extremely happy to be who I am and where I am. Most of the reasons that I am that person were paid for by two people in Akron who never had an executive title or a whole lot of money. The least I can do with what they gave me is to acknowledge it, be thankful, and hand it on.
