Most managers don’t plan to become one. They’re good at their job, a post comes up, and someone says “you’d be great at this”. The next Monday, they’re responsible for people.
The CMI calls them accidental managers, and its research suggests they’re the majority: 82% of people entering management in the UK said they’d had no proper management and leadership training.
Why do good performers struggle as new managers?
Because the job they were good at isn’t the job they now have.
A large study of sales firms found companies tended to promote their best salespeople, and those people tended to become weaker managers. The skills that earned the promotion weren’t the skills the new role needed. In DDI’s research with frontline leaders, 84% found their first leadership role stressful and nine in ten felt unprepared to some extent.
Linda Hill’s long-term study of new managers found the hardest part wasn’t learning tasks. It was working out a new identity: what being in charge actually means, and what kind of manager to be.
What does the usual training miss?
A question that comes before the skills.
First-time manager programmes rightly cover delegation, feedback, one-to-ones and performance conversations. But a new manager can learn all of those and still be inconsistent, because nobody asked them the question underneath: what do I stand for, and what am I trying to achieve?
Without an answer, decisions get made case by case. One team member gets flexibility, another doesn’t. A standard is enforced on Monday and let slide on Friday. Each choice might be defensible. Together they leave the team unsure what their manager will do next.
Why does consistency matter so much for trust?
Because people trust what they can predict.
Trust is someone’s confidence in you with something they care about. For a team, much of that confidence comes from seeing that what their manager says and what they do line up. Research across many studies found this alignment between words and deeds had a stronger effect on trust than the other integrity-related perceptions tested.
You can’t be consistent about values you’ve never named. That’s why, for an accidental manager, clarity comes first.
Why start with purpose and values?
Because they give a new manager something to be consistent with.
When people pursue goals that fit their own values, they tend to put in more sustained effort and are more likely to achieve them. Managers who are clear about their values, and see them fit their organisation, report more commitment and less stress. Most of this research is correlational or comes from outside management, so it points the way rather than proving the case.
The practical point is simple. A manager who has worked out what they want to achieve and how they intend to act has a reference point for every hard decision. Their team starts to see a pattern, and a pattern is what people rely on.
What is a Manifesto, and how does it help?
It’s a one-page statement of what a leader wants to achieve and how they intend to act.
In the Trust Leader Hub, three Purpose playlists take a leader through the questions behind it:
- What do I want to achieve?
- Who do I want to serve?
- What do I believe?
- What motivates me?
- What is my why?
- What are my values?
- How will I act to support my values?
The answers become the leader’s Manifesto: their aim, their purpose and the values they want people to experience from them. Every Purpose activity includes a downloadable Manifesto template, so leaders can build their page as they go. It’s personal, and that’s the point. It isn’t the organisation’s values statement. It’s the new manager’s own answer to the question Linda Hill’s research found so hard: what kind of manager am I going to be?
How does that turn into behaviour people can see?
Through the Trust Map and practice.
We put it this way: purpose is the anchor, the Trust Map is the application, and practice builds the evidence.
The Manifesto says what the manager is aiming for. The Trust Map applies that to a real working relationship, often with someone whose confidence the goal depends on. Then the manager practises one behaviour that makes their values visible. For a new manager, that’s often one of these:
- Apply the same standards in tone, decisions and communication across people and situations.
- Set and confirm clear expectations before work begins.
- Only agree to what you can realistically deliver and control.
These are the behaviours that turn “I value fairness” into something the team can see. The pillar page on leadership challenges covers the challenge of managing former peers in more detail.
What should L&D do with accidental managers?
Start with who they want to be, then build the skills around it.
Give new managers time early on to work out their aim and values, and write them down. Then connect every skill that follows to that foundation: a feedback conversation is a chance to act on a value, not just a technique to apply. Keep the practice in their real work, where they have the least time to spare, and record what happens.
Accidental managers don’t need to become different people. They need to know what they stand for, and act on it often enough that their team can rely on it.