The Manager Who Never Got Trained
Picture a high-performing software engineer. She’s technically brilliant, delivers consistently, and her colleagues respect her. So when a management vacancy opens up, she’s the obvious choice. She gets the promotion, a new title, and a small pay increase. What she doesn’t get is any meaningful preparation for the most different job she’s ever had.
This scenario plays out every day in organizations around the world. And it’s not a talent pipeline problem — it’s a design problem.
The Accidental Manager Problem
The Chartered Management Institute surveyed more than 4,500 workers and managers in 2023 and found that 82% of those who entered management positions had received no formal management or leadership training. The CMI calls these people “accidental managers” — promoted for technical competence or tenure, not for any demonstrated ability to lead people. Notably, a quarter of those accidental managers are in senior leadership roles.
This isn’t just a UK phenomenon. Gartner research from the same year found that 85% of new people managers in the US receive no formal training before taking on their role. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, analyzed by WorkTango, found that manager on-the-job training dropped from an average of 68 days in 2018 to 50 days in 2023 — a reduction of more than a quarter at a time when the demands on managers have never been higher.
The reasons organizations promote this way are understandable. High performers are visible. They’re trusted. They’re available. Designing an actual development pathway for future managers takes time, resources, and organizational commitment that many companies haven’t prioritized. So the path of least resistance becomes the default.
What It Costs
The downstream effects of undertrained management are well documented. Gallup’s research, drawn from more than two decades of employee engagement data, finds that managers account for approximately 70% of the variance in team engagement scores. Poor management doesn’t just affect morale — it shapes whether people do their best work or disengage entirely.
The CMI’s 2023 data puts numbers on what that looks like at the individual level. Among workers who described their manager as ineffective, only 15% felt valued at work, compared to 72% of those with effective managers. Only 27% reported job satisfaction, versus 74% for those with effective managers. And half of those with ineffective managers said they planned to resign within the year — more than double the rate of those with effective managers.
One in three of the workers surveyed had already left a job because of a negative relationship with their manager.
The SHRM’s 2023 research echoes this: about four in five people with effective managers feel valued at work — roughly double the rate of those without effective managers. Effective management isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the single most significant lever organizations have over the day-to-day experience of their workforce.
There’s a less-discussed dimension to this as well. The CMI research found that a fifth of managers lack confidence in their own leadership abilities — and a third are planning to leave their jobs within the year. Untrained managers aren’t just a problem for the people they lead. They’re a retention risk in their own right.
Why “Natural Leaders” Aren’t Enough
A common response to the accidental manager problem is to suggest that some people are just natural leaders — that management instinct either exists or it doesn’t, and training is supplementary at best. The evidence doesn’t support this.
The skills required to manage people effectively — giving developmental feedback, having difficult conversations, setting clear expectations, coaching for performance, recognizing early signs of burnout — are learnable. They can be taught, practiced, and refined. But they don’t transfer automatically from technical expertise, and they don’t emerge reliably from years of experience without deliberate instruction.
The CMI found that managers who had received formal training were significantly more likely to trust their teams, feel comfortable leading change, and be willing to address poor behavior — all behaviors with direct implications for team culture and organizational integrity.
A Gartner survey found that 1 in 5 managers would prefer not to have the position at all. That’s not a motivation problem. It’s a preparation problem. People who feel unprepared tend to disengage from roles they were never equipped to perform well.
What Effective Manager Development Looks Like
The evidence on what actually works in manager development points away from one-time training events and toward sustained, embedded development. A few principles are consistent across the research:
Start before the promotion. Most organizations begin developing managers after they’re already in the role — often after problems have already surfaced. Organizations that identify potential managers early and build development pathways before the promotion reduce the adjustment period and the likelihood of early failure.
Focus on the hard parts. Generic leadership training rarely addresses what managers find most difficult: navigating pay conversations, managing underperformance, supporting team members through personal crises, maintaining trust during organizational change. Harvard Business Review research suggests that training which focuses specifically on high-stakes, uncomfortable scenarios produces better outcomes than broad competency frameworks.
Make it ongoing, not episodic. A two-day workshop doesn’t change management behavior. What changes behavior is repeated practice, feedback, and coaching over time. Organizations with the best management cultures tend to treat manager development the way they treat customer development — as a continuous relationship, not a one-time event.
Build accountability into the system. Manager effectiveness should be measured, not assumed. Upward feedback mechanisms, skip-level conversations, and team health indicators create the visibility needed to identify where development is working and where managers are struggling. Without measurement, good intentions don’t translate into behavioral change.
The Organizational Accountability Gap
It’s worth being direct about something the data makes clear: the accidental manager problem is primarily an organizational failure, not an individual one. The engineer who accepted a management role without adequate preparation didn’t design her own development plan. The organization did — or more accurately, didn’t.
Blaming undertrained managers for the consequences of undertrained management is both unfair and counterproductive. The more useful question for HR and leadership teams is: what systems do we need to ensure that the people we promote into management are actually prepared to lead?
That question doesn’t have a simple answer. But it has a measurable one. The organizations that invest seriously in manager development — not as a one-time training budget line, but as a core capability — consistently see the difference in engagement, retention, and team performance. The research on this is clear. The implementation, as always, is where the work is.
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