Digging out from the recent snow in New York City, I found myself thinking fondly of spring training, which has started at last.

Star players-turned coaches get a lot of press around now (Mark McGwire comes to mind). Yet a Wall Street Journal piece noted that quality hitters who become hitting coaches did poorly during their first year, based on the team’s negative change in on-base percentage. What’s going on? Are stars in one position routinely incapable of succeeding in another role?

Sounds like the Peter Principle at work: companies promote employees from a role in which they excel to one in which they don’t; for example, promoting their best salespeople to managers. The company ends up losing a productive salesperson and gaining a mediocre manager. Are companies making the same mistake as baseball, promoting stars beyond their capabilities? Sometimes. Can you avoid making that mistake? Definitely! Here’s a three-step method:

Know the success criteria for each position

Either you as a manager, or your company, should clearly define what an incumbent needs to do in order to succeed in a position. If this isn’t clear, then it’s too easy to promote based on success in the current job, personality, or need, rather than talent.

Compare standards

Staying with the sales example: what criteria make for a successful salesperson versus a successful manager? Where are the overlaps; where are the differences? It’s easy to assume that a person’s strengths in one job will carry them through in a different role. As a manager, you have to consider the talents that are both critical to the new position and difficult to develop. If you promote an incumbent who doesn’t already demonstrate an important ability that is hard to develop, how much time do you want to spend trying to teach him?

Know your players

No matter how busy you are, pay attention to more than just the results of a person’s work. Learn what they think, how they feel and what they say as they do their jobs. Do their strengths come easily, or do they really have to work at them? Do they enjoy doing what they do well? As my ten-year-old daughter tells me, just because she’s good at something doesn’t mean she likes it. If the candidate demonstrates the talents that are critical and difficult to develop, and if she likes using those critical talents, promote her.

There’s no magic bullet to making promotion decisions. It takes time, attention to detail, and the willingness to really get to know your people. But once you’ve got your best players in the right spots…play ball!