05 August 2026
If there's one challenge that comes up time and again in conversations with employers, it's this: talented people are being promoted into management roles without being properly prepared for them.
Most HR directors and learning and development leaders will recognise this situation within their own organisation. Every year, hundreds of thousands of people are promoted into management roles, almost always for the same reason: they were excellent at their previous job. However, what made them successful there doesn't necessarily translate into the skills they need now.
Introducing the first-time manager problem. Strong technical performers get pushed into people leadership with almost no preparation, and more often than not, everyone downstream, including their team, their own manager, and the organisation's results, absorbs the consequences and the many hidden costs.
A problem hiding in plain sight
Research from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development has repeatedly flagged a UK-wide gap in workplace people-management skills. In its Labour Market Outlook, only 27% of organisations said most of their managers had received proper training in managing people, while 12% admitted none of their managers had received any training at all.
Ask any HR Director privately and most will admit the same thing: a meaningful proportion of their managers were never given proper new manager training. They inherited the title and the capability was assumed to follow.
Why it keeps happening
There's no villain in this story. Promoting your strongest performer feels like the obvious, fair, low-risk move; it rewards good work and keeps talent inside the business. The trouble is that technical excellence and people leadership draw on almost entirely different skill sets: one is about doing the work well, the other is about enabling other people to do it well.
The people who end up struggling in these roles are rarely short on talent. Instead, they are short on time, support, and a clear sense of what the job now requires. Organisations don't intend to skip the development step. It simply isn't built into the promotion process by default, so it gets left to chance, or to the individual to figure out under pressure.
Where it costs you
In many organisations, the impact of an underprepared manager isn't immediately obvious. Teams continue to function, projects are delivered and day-to-day work carries on.
But when employers look more closely, common patterns emerge. A valued employee leaves because they felt unsupported. Team members stop raising concerns because previous issues weren't addressed. Performance conversations become inconsistent, and small problems are allowed to escalate before anyone notices.
On the surface, it simply looks like a good employee found a better offer. However, when you dig deeper it’s clear to see that it isn't a coincidence, it's a costly mistake. Research from PayFit puts the average cost of replacing a UK employee at around £25,000 once recruitment, ramp-up time and lost productivity are factored in. For senior or specialist roles, this can increase to between £40,000 to £100,000 per position. That's a meaningful chunk of budget spent replacing someone, rather than developing anyone.
While you can put a number on the cost of departures, it’s harder to measure what happens to the people who stay. The ones who watched a colleague raise the same issue twice and go unheard and quietly recalibrated how much effort this job is worth. That kind of disengagement shows up months later, in slipping deadlines and shrinking initiative, in a team that does exactly what's asked and nothing more.
The job has changed, but the support hasn't
Even in the most well-run organisations, this would be a hard moment to be a first-time manager. Today's new managers aren't just learning how to run a team; they're doing it through hybrid working patterns, organisational change, and a wave of AI-enabled tools that are reshaping how work gets planned, delegated and reviewed.
This isn't about giving managers AI skills in the technical sense either, it's about something deeper. Helping a team adopt new tools and new ways of working while trust, workload and job security all feel slightly less certain than they did a year ago. That takes the kind of leading through change training most organisations often don’t build into a first-time manager's first few months, because until recently, they didn't need to.
A manager who can run a good one-to-one but freezes when a team is anxious about what AI means for their role isn't failing; they were simply never equipped for a version of the job that didn't exist when most management training was written.
This is the layer most ‘accidental manager' content misses. Today, organisations need leaders who can do more than run good team meetings. They need to build leaders who can guide people through change and technology shifts they haven't fully made sense of themselves. That's a materially bigger ask than the one most first-time manager programmes, where they exist, were designed for.
The good news: this is fixable
Consistency in management matters, which is why structured, progressive first-time manager training changes the picture. When managers are equipped with the skills to lead effectively, employees are more likely to have a positive experience regardless of team or department. CIPD research found that employees with the highest-rated managers are almost three times more likely to be satisfied in their jobs (88% versus 30%) than those with the lowest-rated managers.
Programmes like ILM's Level 3 Diploma in Leadership and Management are built for this moment, giving first-time managers a practical foundation rather than leaving them to work it out alone, while Level 5 Operational Leadership and Management Skills supports those stepping up into broader middle-management responsibility.
This is what happens when development is structured and progressive, rather than left to chance. Managers report greater confidence, sharper communication, and stronger leadership skills, and organisations see that translate into measurable results.
Where to start
The first-time manager problem has a systemic answer. It starts with treating management capability as something you build deliberately. ILM has spent decades helping organisations do exactly that, and we're bringing a refreshed approach to early and middle manager development to help meet this moment.
People don't need to learn management by accident, and organisations that build management capability on purpose don't just get better managers, they create more consistent employee experiences and keep their best people.
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