Why your new managers aren't leading

Every owner I meet has made the same promotion. They take the person who is best at the job, give them a team, and wait for things to get easier. They rarely do.

Three months later the new manager is still doing the job, only now with interruptions. The difficult conversation has not happened. The review has been moved, twice. And every problem the team cannot solve finds its way, sooner or later, to the owner's desk.

It would be comforting to call this a failure of character. It is nothing of the kind.

I

Being good at a job and leading the people who do it are two different trades. We accept this everywhere else. Nobody expects a fine bricklayer to become a quantity surveyor overnight. Yet we expect exactly that of a good salesman made into a sales manager, and we are surprised when it goes wrong.

Most new managers are given a title and nothing else. No one sits them down and says what they now own. No one shows them how to tell a colleague, plainly and kindly, that his work is not good enough. So they do what any sensible person does in unfamiliar country. They retreat to the ground they know.

A promotion without instruction is not a reward. It is a test that nobody has explained.

II

There is a second difficulty, and it is the owner's. Having built the business, you know every answer. When a question arrives at your door, it is quicker to answer it than to send it back. Each time you do, the manager learns that the decision was never really theirs.

I say this without blame. I have done it myself. But it means the cure is not only for the manager. It is for both of you.

III

The remedy is not a course. It is three dull, practical habits, kept up for long enough to stick.

First, write down what the manager owns. Decisions, budgets, people, problems. Put it on one page. If it is not written down, they will check with you, and they will be right to.

Second, practise the conversation they are avoiding. Pick one real case. Talk it through before it happens: what will be said, what the other person may say back, where it should end. Then let them have it. Afterwards, ask what went well and what did not.

Third, follow up every week or fortnight. Ten minutes is enough. Ask what they decided, what they passed upwards, and what they could have handled themselves. Most training fails here, in the weeks after the training day. Habits are made by repetition, not by inspiration.

IV

None of this is clever, and that is rather the point. Your managers are not the problem. The gap between doing the work and leading the people is. Close it, and the queue at your door grows shorter, week by week, until one morning you notice it has gone.

Russ Fraser has spent twenty-five years running businesses, including leading Quest Travel out of administration in 2001. He lives near Stratford-upon-Avon and helps owner-managers across Warwickshire and the West Midlands build managers who lead. More essays →