The promotion arrives with congratulations, a modest pay rise, and an expectation that everything will somehow fall into place. Yet within months, the newly minted manager finds themselves drowning—team morale has plummeted, projects are behind schedule, and the confidence that earned them the promotion has evaporated. This scenario plays out in organisations across the globe with alarming frequency. Research suggests that approximately 73% of managers struggle or fail outright during their first year in a leadership role, a statistic that reveals a systemic crisis in how organisations develop and support their leaders.
This failure rate represents more than individual setbacks. It translates to billions in lost productivity, damaged team dynamics, diminished innovation, and talented individuals who either leave organisations or retreat from leadership opportunities altogether. Understanding why this crisis persists—and more importantly, how to address it—has become essential for organisations seeking competitive advantage through effective leadership.
The Myth of Natural Leadership Ability
At the root of the leadership crisis lies a persistent and damaging myth: that people who excel in individual contributor roles will naturally excel as managers. Organisations routinely promote their best salespeople, engineers, analysts, or designers into leadership positions based primarily on technical competence, with little regard for whether these individuals possess or can develop the fundamentally different skill set that management requires.
The transition from individual contributor to manager represents one of the most significant professional transformations a person can experience. Success metrics shift from personal output to team performance. The skills that drove individual excellence—deep technical expertise, personal productivity, independent problem-solving—must give way to coaching, delegation, strategic thinking, and navigating organisational politics. This isn’t simply an expansion of responsibilities; it’s a wholesale reimagining of how one creates value.
Many newly promoted managers continue operating as individual contributors whilst attempting to bolt management responsibilities onto already full schedules. They’re the first to arrive and last to leave, working frantically to complete their own tasks whilst squeezing in management duties around the edges. This approach inevitably leads to burnout, team dysfunction, and the perception of failure—not because these individuals lack potential, but because they’ve received neither training nor permission to fundamentally change how they work.
The Peter Principle in Action
Laurence Peter’s observation that “people rise to the level of their incompetence” finds perhaps its clearest expression in first-time manager failure. Organisations promote based on current performance without adequately assessing capacity for the next role. The brilliant individual contributor becomes a struggling manager not because they’ve suddenly become less capable, but because the organisation has placed them in a role requiring capabilities they’ve never developed and been given no opportunity to practice.
This dynamic creates a tragic irony: the very people organisations most want to retain and reward are placed in positions where they’re likely to experience failure and frustration. The toll on individuals can be severe—damaged confidence, increased stress, and questioning of career choices. Some retreat back to individual contributor roles if possible, whilst others leave organisations entirely, taking their institutional knowledge and technical expertise with them.
The Training Gap
Perhaps the most glaring factor in first-year manager failure is the near-universal lack of adequate preparation and support. Studies indicate that fewer than 30% of first-time managers receive any formal leadership training before assuming their roles. Those who do receive training often experience brief, generic programmes that fail to address the specific challenges they’ll face or provide ongoing support as those challenges materialise.
The assumption seems to be that leadership skills can be absorbed through observation or acquired on-the-job. Whilst experience certainly teaches, allowing new managers to learn exclusively through trial and error is both inefficient and unnecessarily painful. It’s akin to promoting someone to senior engineer and expecting them to pick up advanced programming languages through osmosis. We wouldn’t accept this approach for technical skills; why do we tolerate it for leadership competencies?
Effective manager training must address several core domains: giving feedback, conducting difficult conversations, delegating effectively, managing performance, building team culture, strategic planning, and emotional intelligence. Each of these represents a complex skill set requiring both conceptual understanding and practical application. Without structured development opportunities, new managers are left to reinvent wheels their organisations have already invented or to perpetuate dysfunctional patterns they observed in their own previous managers.
The Delegation Dilemma
Among the specific challenges that derail new managers, delegation stands out as particularly pernicious. Delegation requires managers to trust others to complete work that they themselves could do faster and better—at least in the short term. For individuals promoted precisely because of their superior individual performance, this feels counterintuitive and risky.
The failure to delegate effectively creates multiple problems simultaneously. Managers become bottlenecks, slowing team progress whilst working excessive hours. Team members remain underdeveloped because they’re not given appropriately challenging work. Strategic and planning activities get neglected because managers are consumed with tactical execution. Trust erodes as team members perceive their manager doesn’t believe in their capabilities.
Learning to delegate effectively requires more than simply understanding its importance intellectually. It demands developing comfort with uncertainty, building assessment skills to match tasks with capabilities, creating effective briefing and monitoring systems, and cultivating patience as team members develop competence. These skills take time to build and benefit enormously from coaching and feedback—resources rarely provided to struggling first-time managers.
The Feedback Vacuum
New managers operate in what can only be described as a feedback vacuum. Their team members, newly subordinate to someone who was recently a peer, are unlikely to provide candid feedback about management effectiveness. Senior leaders, often stretched thin themselves, may not have bandwidth to provide regular coaching. The result is that new managers receive feedback only when problems have become severe—and by that point, patterns have calcified and confidence has been damaged.
This feedback deficit is particularly problematic because management is inherently relational. Unlike individual contributor work where output quality is often objectively measurable, management effectiveness manifests through team dynamics, engagement, and performance—metrics that are both lagged and influenced by multiple factors. New managers may not realise they’re struggling until significant damage has occurred.
Organisations that successfully support first-time managers create structured feedback mechanisms: regular check-ins with senior leaders or mentors, 360-degree feedback processes designed specifically for new managers, and peer cohorts where new managers can share challenges and learn from one another’s experiences. These systems provide the information new managers need to course-correct before small issues become catastrophic failures.
The Emotional Intelligence Gap
Technical competence and analytical capability, whilst necessary, prove insufficient for management success. The ability to recognise and manage one’s own emotions whilst perceiving and influencing the emotions of others—emotional intelligence—predicts management success more reliably than cognitive ability or technical skills.
Many newly promoted managers possess underdeveloped emotional intelligence, having succeeded in individual contributor roles where it mattered less. Suddenly they must navigate team conflicts, deliver difficult feedback, manage their own frustration and stress, and create psychological safety for their teams. Without these capabilities, even managers with good intentions create toxic team dynamics.
Emotional intelligence can be developed, but it requires different approaches than technical training. Self-awareness grows through reflection, feedback, and often coaching. Empathy develops through perspective-taking exercises and exposure to diverse viewpoints. Emotion regulation improves through mindfulness practices and stress management techniques. Few organisations provide these developmental opportunities to new managers, essentially expecting them to develop sophisticated interpersonal skills through happenstance.
The Authority Paradox
New managers face what might be called the authority paradox: they possess formal authority through their title and position but lack the earned authority that comes from demonstrated leadership competence. This gap creates significant challenges, particularly when managing former peers or when trying to influence without being perceived as wielding positional power heavy-handedly.
The instinct, particularly when feeling insecure, is to lean heavily on formal authority—to make decisions unilaterally, to issue directives, to emphasise hierarchy. This approach typically backfires, creating resentment and disengagement. Building earned authority requires demonstrating competence, showing vulnerability, admitting mistakes, involving team members in decisions, and consistently acting with integrity. These behaviours feel risky when you’re already uncertain and fearful of losing control.
Skilled mentors help new managers navigate this paradox, providing guidance on when to assert authority, when to seek input, and how to build credibility through action rather than declaration. Without this guidance, new managers often oscillate between extremes—either abdicating authority entirely and failing to provide necessary direction, or wielding it oppressively and alienating their teams.
Organisational Complicity
Whilst much focus falls on individual manager deficits, organisations bear substantial responsibility for the leadership crisis. Beyond inadequate training, systemic factors contribute to first-time manager failure. Unrealistic expectations about how quickly new managers should reach full effectiveness, insufficient reduction in individual contributor responsibilities during the transition, lack of structured onboarding into management roles, and failure to identify and address struggling managers early all reflect organisational rather than individual failings.
Some organisations maintain toxic cultures where poor management behaviours are modelled by senior leaders and perpetuated down the hierarchy. New managers who observe leaders managing through intimidation, taking credit for others’ work, or avoiding difficult conversations naturally conclude these approaches are acceptable or even expected. Addressing the leadership crisis requires examining and potentially transforming organisational culture, not merely fixing individual deficits.
Pathways to Success
The 73% failure rate isn’t inevitable. Organisations that intentionally invest in manager development achieve dramatically better outcomes. This investment takes multiple forms: comprehensive pre-promotion assessment that evaluates leadership potential alongside technical competence, mandatory training before assuming management responsibilities, ongoing coaching and mentoring, realistic job previews that help candidates understand what management actually entails, and reduced individual contributor responsibilities during the transition period.
Creating cohorts of new managers who progress through structured development programmes together provides both learning opportunities and peer support networks. These cohorts reduce the isolation many new managers experience and create safe spaces to acknowledge struggles and seek advice. The most effective programmes extend over months or even years, recognising that leadership development is a journey rather than an event.
The leadership skills crisis represents one of the most significant opportunities for organisational improvement. By acknowledging the systemic nature of first-time manager failure and investing appropriately in development systems, organisations can transform this crisis into a competitive advantage—building cultures where leadership capability is deliberately cultivated and where managers are set up for success rather than left to sink or swim.
