Last year, I worked with an organization to do leadership training for their entire leadership team.
Sarah (real person, but name is changed) has been a manager for 3 years – she had been great in her previous role, so they needed her to be manager to build out a team since her function was becoming more important.
Here’s the part that probably sounds familiar – she never got any training or coaching.
So while things went fine for a while, it soon became clear that even with only 1 employee under her, she was struggling to hold her team accountable
- He was missing deadlines
- She was avoiding difficult performance conversations because she didn’t know how to have them
- Because he wasn’t getting feedback, he kept doing certain things wrong and never corrected them
- He got comfortable doing things the way he wanted to do them, frustrating other teams and leading to complaints from other people, both internally and externally
By the time she went through my course and was able to start having difficult conversations, she ended up having to part ways with that employee.
The good news? She’s now expanded her team to 3 people and has created a much more intentional structure and team that they’ve been outperforming her own expectations and she’s been able to let go of the day-to-day stuff and focus on the bigger, strategic things to develop her function.
Here’s the bad news:
It wasn’t Sarah’s fault that first employee didn’t work out. It wasn’t his either.
The failure point was the system and leaders that promoted her in the first place.
The Cost of Avoidance
Here’s the reality – this isn’t a rare occurrence.
I’ve seen it too many times in my work with leadership teams.
So many leaders are “accidental leaders” – promoted because they’re really good at what they’re currently doing – but leadership and management is a different skill set. One that requires additional training and support.
Your biggest risk isn’t that you have high turnover.
Your biggest issue is that you lose your top performer, because they become an unprepared manager and eventually burn themselves out and leave.
And avoidance isn’t preserving that relationship – it’s quietly destroying it.
What’s the literal cost of losing people? Of replacing them? Of getting them new people up to speed?
What’s the cost to your team? Your culture? To the quality of your service or product?
How to stop avoiding and lean into performance conversations
Most of these situations don’t improve by themselves. So, if you were managing Sarah, this is what you should do:
Step 1: Have the direct conversation with them
- Give specific feedback – get concrete and gather data
- Separate the concepts of technical excellence from management capability
- Be clear about the context and why it’s important
- Make it about development, not failure
- Start the conversations sooner rather than later
Step 2: Create a structured coaching plan to develop them
- Define and clarify what good management looks like
- Set clear milestones and check-ins
- Provide resources, support, and ongoing feedback
- Co-create a timeline for improvement
Prevent this in the future
It’s one thing to coach and train people once they’re in the position. But another things to consider is preventing it in the future by better assessing who to promote in the future. Here are some things you can consider:
- Get clear on what leadership skills/competencies that will ensure someone successful in your organization
- Give people trial leadership opportunities to assess/practice/develop those skills
- Offer training and coaching to those you identified as high potential or ones you’ve promoted.
At the end of the day, not only do “accidental” managers have to get better at feedback.
Every leader needs to get better at giving good feedback. It’s how anyone gets better at anything.
Cheers,
Chris
PS – Reply with the #1 operational drain on your team’s productivity – I read every response and often turn the most common challenges into future issues.
