We’ve all seen it happen. It’s a familiar story in almost every organisation: one of your star performers is promoted into a management role, and quite rightly, it feels like a moment for celebration. Before long, however, their initial enthusiasm evaporates, replaced by stress, dipping performance, and a palpable sense of confusion. What on earth went wrong? Let’s be blunt: we handed someone the keys to the car without ever showing them how to drive.
The truth is, we are setting a huge number of our new managers up for a fall. The Chartered Management Institute has found that a staggering 82% of first-time managers get no formal training for their new role. That’s four out of every five. These aren’t people lacking potential; they are simply being sent into a new job completely under-equipped. When we leave leadership to chance like this, the consequences ripple out far beyond that one individual.
The Pernicious Trap of the Accidental Manager
Time and time again, we reward technical brilliance with a promotion that demands a completely different skill set. Your best analyst becomes the new team lead. The most gifted developer is suddenly managing people. What we consistently fail to acknowledge is that technical excellence and leadership capability are two different currencies.
Leadership requires a whole other toolkit, one that’s not about mastering a task but about genuinely understanding human dynamics. Without that fundamental shift, even the most well-meaning new managers start to flounder. Micromanagement begins to creep in. Communication starts to fracture. Stress levels climb. And slowly, but surely, the team’s morale begins to crumble.
This isn’t a problem unique to one sector or country; it’s a damaging pattern playing out in organisations all over the world. The “accidental manager” has become a quiet, yet incredibly effective, saboteur of both growth and well-being.
Why ‘Sink or Swim’ is a Terrible People Strategy
Think about it. You’d never hire someone into your finance team and just expect them to ‘figure out’ the numbers. Yet we do precisely that with people leadership all the time. We work on the flawed assumption that it will just come naturally, that a bit of time, exposure or raw instinct will be enough.
But managing people is a craft, a skill as learnable and measurable as anything technical. When we adopt a sink-or-swim mentality, we don’t just risk the manager’s career; we sabotage the entire team’s experience. Productivity grinds to a halt, motivation withers, and trust, once lost, is incredibly difficult to rebuild.
In the hospitality world, a sector I know well, we grasped this long ago. A five-star guest experience doesn’t happen by accident; it’s the direct result of deliberate coaching, clear standards, and a strong culture working together. The very same logic must apply to how we nurture our leaders.
What Real Leadership Actually Looks Like
So many people think management development is about learning to manage a calendar or delegate tasks efficiently. But true leadership is about three things: clarity, connection and care.
The best managers I’ve worked with do three things exceptionally well:
- They instil purpose. They are brilliant at helping their teams understand why their work is important, connecting the day-to-day tasks to the organisation’s bigger picture.
- They listen and engage. They know that leadership is a dialogue, not a monologue. It’s about creating a safe space for feedback, listening with genuine intent, and then acting with empathy.
- They tailor their style. Every person on their team has unique strengths and motivations. Great managers adjust their approach accordingly, building trust through deep understanding rather than top-down control.
Put simply, they lead by example, not by instruction. They are the architects of environments where people feel seen, trusted and genuinely motivated to do their best work.
The Alarming Ripple Effect of Untrained Managers
When we neglect to train our managers properly, the fallout is immense. Disengagement creeps up. Attrition inevitably follows. And productivity takes a nosedive. We all know replacing an employee can cost between six to nine months of their salary, but the real, lasting cost is to your culture. Toxic work environments don’t appear out of thin air; they are nurtured, day by day, by poor leadership.
Creativity becomes an early casualty. Innovation is choked off before it can begin. And stress becomes the new normal. This isn’t just bad for the bottom line; it’s corrosive to the long-term health of your entire organisation.
And yet, despite all this evidence staring us in the face, why do so many businesses still treat leadership training as an optional extra?
The Real Blocker: Your Organisational Structure
Even when a business does invest in leadership development, it’s often a standalone initiative, completely disconnected from the organisation’s systems. We pour resources into building an individual’s skills, only to send them back into a working environment that punishes autonomy and rewards control.
Research consistently shows that managers can excel in personal areas like self-awareness and emotional intelligence, but then struggle to have any real influence on the wider culture or strategy. This isn’t because they lack the ability, but because the very structures around them are designed to restrict it.
Leadership cannot flourish in a vacuum. If the surrounding culture doesn’t also evolve, even your best-trained managers will feel like they’re trying to steer a ship against a powerful tide.
So, How Do We Start Fixing This?
If we are serious about building organisations that are fit for the future, we have to completely reframe how we develop our leaders. Here’s where you can start making a real difference:
- Nurture a leadership culture, everywhere. Leadership isn’t something that’s just reserved for the boardroom. Actively encourage initiative, ownership and accountability at every single level of the business.
- Empower proper decision-making. Micromanagement is a momentum killer. Give your managers the autonomy to actually lead, not just to execute instructions from above.
- Commit to continuous, ongoing learning. Leadership is a craft that constantly evolves. You need to provide ongoing coaching, peer learning forums, and solid feedback loops to help your managers stay sharp and adaptive.
Creating cultures of excellence is about intentional design, not about ticking a box with a one-off workshop.
Leadership is a Skill, Not a Gift. Let’s Start Treating It That Way.
Leadership is not some innate quality you’re either born with or not. It is cultivated. It is coached. And critically, it is practised in a supportive context.
Simply throwing people into the deep end doesn’t build resilience; it breeds anxiety and burnout. It doesn’t have to be this way.
When we properly invest in building strong, capable managers, we don’t just elevate a few individuals; we unlock the full, latent potential of our teams and our entire organisation. The path to operational excellence and a genuinely people-powered business runs directly through great leadership. It’s time we stopped treating it as a luxury and started treating it as the critical competitive advantage it truly is.
