By Julie Anderson, Vice President of Business Development.
Ask a room of executive coaches how often someone is promoted into management with no preparation for it, and you get the same answer at the same time. “All the time,” says Austin Smith of the Cleaver Company. “Yes, all the time,” says his colleague Graham Smith.
OMNI works with organizations across the country, Kansas City included, that are navigating the impact of that gap. A supervisor who was excellent on the floor is now struggling with a team. A clinical lead who never wanted to manage anyone is now responsible for six people. The promotion looked like a reward. Ninety days later, it can begin to look like a retention risk.
We asked four coaches from The Cleaver Company, OMNI’s leadership development partner, what they see in those first three months. Here is what they said.
Four conditions where it happens most
Todd Stone spent most of his career building and running small businesses before he left a COO role to coach full-time. He named four environments where the way an organization is built all but guarantees someone gets promoted before they are ready.
- Small businesses. “There aren’t enough hands to reach around every problem,” Todd says, so people get promoted because someone has to be.
- High-growth organizations. Opportunity outruns readiness. “Sometimes the next best person for the role isn’t necessarily prepared for it.”
- High-turnover organizations. Here the promotion is a symptom. There is usually a cultural problem underneath it that the new manager inherits along with the title.
- Teams that require deep subject-matter expertise. When you cannot hire a manager from outside the industry, you promote from inside it, ready or not.
Austin added a fifth pattern that cuts across all four: the high performer who gets promoted for being good at the job. “We see it in sales,” he says. “They get promoted to be a sales manager, and what makes you good at sales might not make you a good people leader.”
This distinction helps explain why organizations often miss the issue until performance challenges emerge. Everyone involved has evidence the person is capable. The evidence is just about a different job.
Where New Managers Often Struggle
Delegation, how managers unlock the success of their teams
Every coach named delegation first. Elizabeth Souder, who has been doing organizational health and executive training since 2019, described the switch a new manager has to make: “Now I’m not responsible for doing the job, I’m responsible for removing the barriers and the friction points for my people to be successful.”
When someone does not make that switch, they keep doing the work they were promoted out of. Their team experiences that as micromanagement. In 360 reviews, Elizabeth says, delegation is the gap that surfaces most often.
Elizabeth also flagged the version of this that organizations create themselves. “It’s particularly difficult when the new manager is actually keeping a portion of their old job while also becoming responsible for managing a team.” They got more work and nothing was taken off their plate.
Politics, arriving without warning
Most first-time managers have been sheltered from organizational politics, or given an incomplete picture of it. Then they are promoted and become a participant. Todd sees people caught off guard by this repeatedly, not by any single conflict, but by discovering that a layer of the organization existed that they had never been shown.
Communication, looks different as a manager
“What they’re good at is doing the job. They’re not necessarily great communicators,” Todd says. Nobody tells them that communicating differently is now part of the role, so they carry over the habits that worked when the output was their own.
Lack of clarity about the role itself
New managers frequently do not know what they are responsible for, what their priorities should be, or what they will be measured against. Todd points out that this is not random. When someone is promoted unexpectedly, something else is usually happening in the organization, like a departure, a restructure, a growth spurt, and that same turbulence is why nobody sat down and defined the job.
Load management
This is the most physical of the five. A new manager looks at a larger workload and responds the way a doer responds. Todd describes the internal monologue: “I’ll just add things to my task list. I’ll expand my day, add hours on the back end, and work on weekends.” They have never had to triage the workload before, because until now the list was finite and somebody else set it. Eighty-hour weeks are not a sustainable answer, and most people discover that the hard way.
The Motivation Behind the Promotion
Graham Smith builds the leadership programs Cleaver’s coaches deliver. When he asks new managers why they wanted the role, the answer is often money, a title, or the next step in their career. Less often, he says, is the answer that they are drawn to the actual work of management.
He describes watching a bell curve inside the first 90 days: relief at getting the role, then the realization of what the role involves. One participant in a Cleaver program put it to him this way, a manager is no longer just managing work. They are equal parts HR, therapist, parent and alarm clock, and they still have to hit their numbers.
Some people find they love that. Graham is clear that plenty of managers get into the role and thrive on the complexity. The others are in one of the hardest jobs in the organization for a reason nobody examined, and Elizabeth notes that the pull does not stop at the first promotion. She had the same conversation last week with an SVP. The system assumes money is the motivator, and it is worth asking whether that is true of the person in front of you before they are three levels in.
What this means if you are the one doing the promoting
Read the five patterns again and notice who owns each of them. The organization decides whether the old job comes with the new one. The organization decides whether the political picture is shared. The organization decides whether the role is defined before someone occupies it. Very little on that list is a character flaw in the person promoted.
The reality is that organizations have significant influence over these outcomes, which means the fixes are available to you. A clear conversation in week one, a defined set of priorities, an honest handoff of the old responsibilities, and a mentor the new manager can turn to with questions. Those are leadership habits, not a formal program.
Our next post covers five specific ways to support a new manager in their first 90 days.
If you have promoted someone into their first management role or you are preparing to, OMNI’s leadership and professional development team can help you build the support around them. Request a consultation.
For more on the skills underneath the transition, see Beyond Hard Skills: Why Soft Skills Win and Leadership Development: A Strategic Investment.
Frequently asked questions
How common is it for someone to be promoted into management without training?
Common enough that four coaches answered “all the time” without hesitating. It concentrates in small businesses, high-growth organizations, high-turnover organizations, and teams that require deep subject-matter expertise.
Why is delegation the first thing to break?
Because the definition of success changes. The new manager was measured on their own output; now they are measured on their team’s. Until that switch happens, they keep doing the work themselves, and their team reads that as micromanagement.
Should a new manager keep part of their old job?
Sometimes it is unavoidable, but it needs to be explicit. Elizabeth Souder finds the hardest situations are the ones where responsibilities were added and nothing was removed, leaving the manager unclear about which half of the job they are accountable for.
Has AI changed which roles get promoted early?
Not yet, according to Todd Stone. He sees AI affecting more technical and repeatable roles rather than management, since managers work at the most complex part of the human-work interface. Elizabeth called it a reasonable trend to keep tracking.
What is the single most useful thing to give a new manager in month one?
Clarity, delivered in a conversation. What does success look like, what am I accountable for, which decisions are mine, and what should I stop doing.