Jesse Jacoby
There is a conversation that happens in almost every company, and it goes something like this.
Someone is very good at their job. They ship clean work, they are dependable, other people like working with them. A management position opens up. The obvious move is to give it to them, because they have earned it and because the alternative is watching them leave for a title somewhere else.
So they get the job. There is an announcement. Somebody buys a cake.
And then, in a startling number of cases, that is the last deliberate thing that happens to them for about a year.
No training. No handover of what the role actually requires. No definition of what good looks like at this level, as distinct from the level they just left. They get a team, a budget, a calendar that fills up overnight with meetings they do not understand the purpose of, and an unspoken expectation that a person who was excellent at one job will be automatically excellent at a completely different one.
The Chartered Management Institute has put a number on this in the UK: 82 percent of people who move into management do so with no formal training. Eighty-two percent. That is not a gap in a development program. That is the absence of a development program, applied to the majority.
Why this persists
It is worth sitting with the question of why, because the answer is not that leaders do not care.
First, the failure is invisible and slow. A bad hire in a technical role shows up in a sprint. A bad first-time manager shows up eighteen months later as attrition on a team, a project that mysteriously never got traction, and a couple of good people who quietly downgraded their ambitions. By the time you can see it, the causal chain is too long to trace back and nobody assigns it to the promotion decision.
Second, we confuse the promotion with the preparation. Being promoted feels like a validation of readiness. It is not. It is a validation of past performance in a different job. But it lands like a verdict, and both the organization and the person tend to treat it that way. If they were ready enough to be promoted, the logic goes, they must be ready enough to do it.
Third, the person who most needs help is the least likely to ask for it. They were just publicly identified as one of the good ones. Walking into their boss’s office in month three and saying “I have no idea what I am doing” feels like handing back the promotion. So they do not. They improvise, they work longer hours, and they present a calm exterior that everyone above them reads as competence.
That third one is the cruelest, and it is the reason the problem is so persistently underestimated. The data on how badly new managers are struggling is systematically suppressed by the new managers themselves.
What it actually costs
Try to price it and you run into the same diffusion problem.
The costs are real. A team run badly for a year does less, and does it worse. Good people leave, and people leave managers far more often than they leave companies. The manager themselves is burning through goodwill and confidence they will need later, and some percentage of them will conclude they are simply not management material when what actually happened is that nobody taught them anything.
But none of that arrives as an invoice. There is no line item called “cost of untrained managers.” So there is no budget line to defend, no owner, and no forcing function.
Meanwhile, the same organization is often spending real money on senior leadership development, executive coaching, and offsites for people who already know how to do the job. There is a reasonable case for that spend. There is a much better case for spending at the layer where most of your employees actually experience the company. Gallup’s research puts managers at roughly 70 percent of the variance in team engagement. That is where the leverage sits, and it is where the investment is thinnest.
What actually helps
Having watched this from both the inside and the consulting side for two decades, a few things reliably move the needle.
Treat the first year as a sequence, not a single event. The needs of a manager in week two are almost nothing like the needs of a manager in month eight. Early on it is orientation, priority-setting, and not breaking anything. Later it is reshaping the team and building genuine commitment to a direction. Most training programs deliver one undifferentiated dump of leadership content at the start, which is exactly when the person has the least context to attach it to.
Give them instruments, not inspiration. A new manager does not need a philosophy of leadership. They need to be able to answer, on Thursday, which three things actually matter this quarter, who the stakeholders are that will make or break them, and where their team is genuinely strong versus where they have been hoping for the best. Tools they can fill out beat frameworks they can admire.
Make the implicit explicit. Almost everything a new manager needs to know is already known by somebody in the building. It is just nobody’s job to say it out loud. How decisions really get made here. What your boss actually means by “keep me posted.” Which relationships need tending before you need them. Writing that down is cheap and it is the highest-return thing most organizations are not doing.
Give them somewhere to be honest. The single most useful thing you can build for a new manager is a small group of peers in the same position, or one person outside their chain of command they can tell the truth to. Not because the advice is better, but because the isolation is what turns a hard year into a damaging one.
If you want a concrete place to start, I have put five of these tools into a Free Starter Kit at TheEmergentManager.com. Key Few Objectives, a Role Charter, a Personal Advisory Board, a Stakeholder Map, and a First Moves plan. They are free, they stand on their own, and any new manager can work through them in an afternoon.
The part that should bother us
We would not put someone in a cockpit because they were excellent in the cabin. We would not hand someone a scalpel because they were a very good nurse. In almost every other domain where the stakes are meaningful, we accept that a change in role requires a change in preparation.
Management is the exception, and it is not because the stakes are lower. A manager holds a great deal of other people’s working lives in their hands. We just happen to have collectively agreed to treat the job as something a competent adult ought to be able to intuit.
They cannot. Nobody can. That is not a character flaw, it is a training failure, and it is one of the more fixable problems in modern organizational life.
