#522 The Sally Problem: Why Organisations Accidentally Break Their Best Problem Solvers | Barbara Wittmann and Niels Brabandt
The Sally Problem: Why Organisations Accidentally Break Their Best Problem Solvers | Barbara Wittmann and Niels Brabandt
Article based on the interview between Barbara Wittmann and Niels Brabandt
Every organisation knows a “Sally”.
The person who fixes everything. The dependable high performer who stays late, solves crises, connects teams, and somehow always finds a way forward when complexity arises. These individuals are admired, trusted, and frequently celebrated as indispensable.
Naturally, organisations promote them.
Yet, according to Barbara Wittmann, this is often precisely where organisations begin making one of their most expensive leadership mistakes.
In this week’s leadership podcast and videocast, leadership expert Niels Brabandt interviews Barbara Wittmann on what she calls “The Sally Problem”, a pattern many organisations unknowingly create when they elevate their strongest problem solvers into leadership positions without preparing them for what leadership actually requires.
The logic appears sound.
Exceptional performance should lead to advancement. Organisations reward dedication, competence, reliability, and resilience. The workhorse becomes the manager. A new title arrives. A larger office perhaps follows. The promotion appears deserved.
However, something crucial is often missing.
The transition from expert contributor to effective leader requires an entirely different skill set.
As Barbara Wittmann explains, organisations frequently assume strong technical or operational performers will naturally succeed in management. Yet solving problems personally and leading systems are fundamentally different responsibilities.
The employee who previously excelled by fixing one challenge at a time suddenly faces organisational complexity, cross-functional coordination, competing priorities, and strategic ambiguity.
Most importantly, nobody teaches them how to navigate this shift.
Leadership at this level demands more than communication workshops or generic management training. It requires learning how to connect ideas, delegate effectively, build narratives, create alignment, and understand how decisions influence wider systems.
In other words, leadership demands a shift in thinking.
One particularly powerful concept raised in the discussion is what Barbara Wittmann describes as “responsibility without mandate”.
Many newly promoted leaders carry formal responsibility while lacking either the confidence, clarity, or perceived authority to make meaningful decisions. They possess the title but feel uncertain regarding the boundaries of their influence. Where does authority begin? Where does it end? What decisions are truly theirs to make?
This ambiguity creates pressure.
Often, these talented individuals begin protecting themselves through territorial behaviour, silo thinking, or excessive control. Not because they lack goodwill, but because they lack support structures.
Perhaps most striking is Barbara Wittmann’s argument that organisations rarely address the underlying psychological transition required when someone moves into leadership. Employees promoted internally frequently continue seeing themselves as the problem solver rather than the system leader.
This perception gap matters.
To bridge it, Barbara Wittmann introduces the concept of a shared mental model, an idea rooted in emergency response systems where coordinated action depends upon a common understanding of goals, roles, and responsibilities.
In practice, the concept is remarkably simple.
A shared mental model ensures teams understand not merely what they are doing, but why they are doing it, how success is defined, and how departments connect toward a common outcome. Rather than operating in fragmented silos, teams align around a shared picture of success.
Without this clarity, organisations drift into confusion.
Meetings focus excessively on detail while losing sight of purpose. Department leaders defend territory rather than collaborating. Projects become reactive rather than intentional.
The leadership lesson here is clear.
Promoting talented people is not enough.
If organisations genuinely want sustainable leadership pipelines, they must invest in helping high performers transition into complexity. This means building confidence, decision-making capability, organisational perspective, and cross-functional alignment.
The Sally Problem is not about promoting the wrong people.
It is about failing to prepare the right people.
The strongest organisations are not merely those that identify talent. They are the organisations that deliberately support talent after promotion.
Because leadership is not inherited through a business card.
Leadership is developed.
For further leadership insights, executive interviews, keynote speaking, organisational transformation support, and leadership development featuring experts such as Barbara Wittmann, connect with Niels Brabandt.
Niels Brabandt
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More on this topic in this week's videocast and podcast with Niels Brabandt: Videocast / Apple Podcasts / Spotify
For the videocast’s and podcast’s transcript, read below this article.
Is excellent leadership important to you?
Let's have a chat: NB@NB-Networks.com
Contact: Niels Brabandt on LinkedIn
Website: www.NB-Networks.biz
Podcast and Videocast Transcript
Niels Brabandt
Do you know that person in your organization that really knows anything and everything, and helps every single time? Great, isn't it? And so pract—so handy every single time. And usually after a certain while, these people become managers. And why this might be an issue, we're going to talk about that today.
Niels Brabandt
We have an expert on the matter with us here today. Hello, and yet welcome back for the third time in a row, now fourth time in total. Hello and welcome back, Barbara Whitman.
Barbara Wittmann
Thanks for having me back.
Niels Brabandt
Thank you very much. So you call it the Sally problem. What is the problem when you have someone—these people actually and genuinely are engaged with the organization organization, and—and they actually want to help? And you claim that we break our best problem solvers. Why do you think we do that?
Barbara Wittmann
Yeah. Yeah. So organizations are looking for what I call the Sallys. Sorry if anyone is named Sally, but okay. And they are promoting them because they are the workhorses. They always fix anything, you know? They stay long nights. They always pull people together. It's like, yay. You know?
Barbara Wittmann
They do qualify to be a high potential, technically, right? So they are moved up the ladder. And usually with the promotion, especially in midsize companies, you get a new business card. You're super proud, you know? Maybe you get the new office and it's like, hey, you got it made.
Barbara Wittmann
But no one gives you the tools of what's next. So if you are the workhorse and you have been pulling the wagon, it's really hard to lean into the things that are really needed as the next level up. And that is not just communication skills or anything that the HR department and their toolbox offers.
Barbara Wittmann
It is how do I string things together? How do I tell a story? How do I connect the dots? How do I delegate? And how do I handle a complexity that all of a sudden has become, you know, the wild gross? While before I was fixating on—on solving one thing, all of a sudden I need to understand how things are connected in a whole different way.
Niels Brabandt
Absolutely. And you—you talk about responsibility without mandate. What do you specifically mean with that?
Barbara Wittmann
So that is something I see everywhere. And that happens when people get promoted into a manager or a director level that they may have the title, but they don't have the means to actually own and make a decision. It's either because they are lacking security in—in their—in their new position. That usually is—is the case. Or it is unclear of how far they can go. You know, where—where does my picket fence end? Where does it start? So they are scared of making decisions.
Barbara Wittmann
So they are basically breaking under a massive load of things, and they don't really have the mandate to change anything. Or they perceive they don't have the mandate. Usually it is the perception problem. And again, if you move up from worker B into the next level you also need to move up in—in perception of yourself. And that is something that is never addressed, really.
Niels Brabandt
Absolutely. And when you talk about this shared mental model, which you often mention how do you deal with—because I'm—I'm absolutely sure in a corporate world people will immediately get why they probably need that. How do you want to convince, let's say, especially in this, the person that pulls the carriage solves everything, that is the workhorse?
Niels Brabandt
Usually these people work in midsize businesses. And—and when—when you come along with shared mental model, they say, "Look, look, look, look, look. We're a midsize business. Anyone works a lot here. That's just how things work. And we do things like that for a long time. And we do it successfully that way." Why should someone suddenly say, "We do it in a different way and engage in a concept called shared mental model"?
Barbara Wittmann
So the shared mental model is essentially something very simple. And it actually comes from emergency response. And shared mental model for emergency response means when a call gets made, they don't just stand around and say, "Huh, which car are we taking now? Huh? You know what? Yeah." So it really is a little bit of a—of a muscle memory and also understanding.
Barbara Wittmann
Yeah. Call gets in. We get in that car. We go, right? You do this. You do this. You know, and—and that's how we do it. So shared mental model is actually hitting the ground running. But we all need to understand that we have the same picture. And that's what I see many times. And that's also where those promoted people are, you know, ha falling on or—or that's their downfall.
Barbara Wittmann
They don't really have any toolbox of doing that, you know? In their—in their head, it's like, "Oh yeah, it's totally clear." But then how do I bring this across to the upper management and also to the people that are needing to do it, essentially? So in—in a simplified version, it's a shared map.
Niels Brabandt
Yeah. So when we talk about this shared map and you say, "Okay, this—this shared map takes care that anyone knows what they need to do in which situation," how can we at the same time prevent that we get this silo thinking that you often have in large organizations where someone says, "Okay, look, this is my job. Left and right of that is not my job"?
Niels Brabandt
So suddenly from anyone doing anything with this workhorse approach, you move into, "Okay, we have a shared map, and this part of the map is mine, and the rest, none of my business," which of course people do not want to have in their organizations. How do you find the golden line in between these two approaches?
Barbara Wittmann
Yeah. And that's a—that's a protective measure. So when you get promoted into the next level up and you're in over your head, literally you have no tools at your disposal, you get territorial. You know, that is—that is a very simple thing. So having a map literally that goes beyond boundaries, yes, it takes a little bit to understand that.
Barbara Wittmann
But let's break it down and say, "Okay, so we have a project that we want to complete and we want to finish successfully." so a simple way of doing that is to sit down with the other department leaders and say, "Okay, so what is—what is the goal? What—what do we all want to achieve?"
Barbara Wittmann
Because a project doesn't just have a start date and an end date. So what's—what's the ideal outcome? And you basically come up with a mission statement, like you would do with any company, right? And that mission statement you put on every first slide. Every project meeting you have, you remind people, you say, "Hey, this is why we're in—in here for, and this is why we're working."
Barbara Wittmann
And then you go into starting your, "This is where we stand, and this is the tasks." Because what happens is we get lost in the minutia.
Niels Brabandt
Absolutely. Yeah. When people now say, "Hmm, this sounds like a lot of work, and it also sounds like something where you can get things really wrong when you don't have the experience." Well, lucky us. We have someone in this room who has the experience, and you can help you with that. When people now say, "I think we need help, how can we get in touch with Barbara? How can people get in touch with you?"
Barbara Wittmann
So very simple over my website, digitalwisdom.co. And I do have a program that I'm running that's called The Threshold. It's an eight-week immersion for exactly the people that get promoted and that need to deal with complexity without a mandate. And they get the tools and the means to actually move forward with a shared mental model.
Niels Brabandt
Brilliant. I think these are the perfect final words. One thing I have to say, we have two other episodes with you, so it really pays off to watch all three. And in total we have four. So we had one before even. So anyone listening to this and saying, "That's pretty good," which it is, listen to all of them.
Niels Brabandt
So of course I have to say, we now see how important it is to have this shared mental model. And you now have the exact same person which can actually help you with getting that into your organization.
Niels Brabandt
So at the end of this podcast and video cast, there's only one thing left for me to say, Barbara, thank you very much for your time.
Barbara Wittmann
Thank you.