We have a situation where a Head of team is thinking of restructuring his team.  The restructure he is thinking of at the moment would involve promoting an existing member of the team to a post in which she would be managing two individuals – currently her colleagues but she is not their line manager at the moment.  There are two issues with this – firstly the person who may be promoted lives with one of the individuals she would end up managing (to clarify they are not in a relationship) and secondly is known to be dimissive of the other individual.

Therefore the Head of team is concerned about the potential promotion – he believes that the individual could do the job in terms of most of the duties aside from line management.  I believe that she should be given the opportunity to prove herself but do share his concern that she would not be fair in terms of her line management and would favour the individual she lives with over the other team member which would create issues.

Anybody ever been in a similar situation or have any insight to share?  Would be appreciated!