Four in five emerging leaders are never trained for the job they've just been given.
By John English, CEO, The Leadership Trust
Four in five emerging leaders are never trained for the job they've just been given. That's not an estimate, it's the finding of a 2023 study by the Chartered Management Institute, based on research with more than 4,500 workers and managers, 82% go into management without it. More than half hold no management qualification of any kind.
These are the people most organisations call emerging leaders, the ones taking on their first real people-management responsibility, and they're also the group everyone quietly assumes will simply work it out as they go.
Most of them are also still doing a version of their old job. Gallup's analysis of span of control, drawn from over 92,000 teams across 104 organisations in 46 countries, found that managers who spend more than 40% of their time still working as individual contributors struggle to lead their teams well, and a lot of first-time managers fit that description exactly. The business then hands them a second, harder job of managing and leading people, on top of the one they already had.
The consequence shows up later, and usually gets blamed on something else. The CMI's research found that half of employees who rate their manager as ineffective are already planning to leave within the year, against just one in five under an effective one. Nearly a third of managers, and more than a quarter of workers, say they've left a job specifically because of a poor relationship with their manager. By the time that shows up in the leaver numbers, nobody's tracing it back to a promotion decision made a year earlier with no training attached to it.
What actually changes this isn't complicated. Gallup's same research found that teams getting meaningful feedback every week see engagement around 70%, compared with 22 to 26% where that feedback isn't happening, and that holds regardless of how many people the manager has. The size of the team isn't really the problem. What the manager has been equipped to do with it is.
This isn't a story about a lack of natural ability or capability. Most of these emerging leaders were promoted because they were good at the job they're leaving. The business hands them a second, harder job on top of it, with no training for either, and assumes it's gone fine because the reporting line looks the same on paper as it always did.
The habits a leader forms in the early stage of managing people, how they give feedback, how they handle authority, how they split their time, rarely stay contained to that stage. However someone learns to do this job is usually how they keep doing it for a long time afterwards, long after anyone remembers they were ever new at it.
It's why I've always believed the real opportunity sits earlier than most organisations look. Fix the habit while it's forming and it holds. Wait until it's set and you're not developing a leader any more, you're trying to undo the bad habits of one.
We built Leadership Trust's work with emerging leaders on that distinction, because the easier moment to get this right only happens once.
