It can't work for a simple reason: you can't make promotions stick. I can name a half-dozen of my colleagues who've been promoted to team lead, discovered that it's a shitty job (this will obviously vary between organizations, but in some cases it involves a lot of responsibility with no authority to actually get stuff done) and returned to being "just" a worker. Then the second- and third-choices get a go and eventually you get to someone who wanted the job, and had in fact been angling for it all along, but that they're willing to do it in return what whatever motivates them (e.g. fancier title) doesn't correlate at all with being any good at it.