Chances are you’ve been here before. You have an all-star employee who’s been crushing it for two or three years, and you know the clock is ticking. You need to do something or you’re going to lose them. The only thing you have to offer is a management role that opens up, so you put them in it and hope for the best.
Here’s the thing: that wasn’t necessarily the wrong instinct. Wanting to reward and retain your best people is exactly right. The problem is that most companies think that promotion is their only option, which is false, and most first-time managers never get prepared for that transition either. It sounds great on paper but can end up being a real gamble, turning your best employees into struggling managers.
The good news is this isn’t complicated to fix. You don’t need to overhaul your entire HR system. You just need a plan, and it doesn’t have to be an elaborate one, just an intentional one. Because you wouldn’t build a house without a blueprint or coach a big game without some kind of strategy. The same logic applies here.
This blog is about giving you ideas on how to build that plan with simple, practical steps to build managers intentionally instead of reactively, so the next time a seat opens up, everyone’s prepared.
Manager Development Has Been Deprioritized for Decades
Let’s be clear that this isn’t a new problem. It’s a decades-old one that American organizations just collectively decided to ignore.
Mike Dixon, President and COO of Hoops, calls this issue out directly. “In this country, we have failed to invest in serious leadership and talent development for decades,” he said on The Business Blueprint podcast. “Startup culture is not real big on spending on leadership training. We got away from the science-based stuff that works.”
He points to companies like GE and 3M as examples of what used to exist. They are organizations that were essentially factories for developing leaders, running rigorous programs and investing seriously in people at every level. That culture has largely disappeared. And what replaced it is a world where people get promoted into management because they were good at their last job, handed a new title, and then expected to figure the rest out on their own.
The result isn’t often just a struggling manager. It’s a disengaged team underneath them, a frustrated leader above them, and a company burning money on turnover and performance gaps that were entirely preventable.
Gallup’s research has consistently found that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement. This means when the management is struggling, the whole team feels it in productivity, in attitude, and eventually in attrition. You can read more about the real cost of that in our blog on the true cost of bad managers.
When Companies Do Invest in Leadership, They Usually Get It Backwards
When companies do intentionally invest in leadership development, they almost always do it the same way: send someone to training, run a workshop, and/or buy an online course. Essentially, try to check the box and move on.
The problem is that formal training accounts for only 10% of how leaders actually develop. The other 90% — the part that really sticks — comes from two things: structured on-the-job experience (70%) and ongoing coaching and feedback (20%). This is from CCL’s research, which we’ve referenced before in our blog on why senior hires fail.
Mike says it straight: companies default to the 10% and then wonder why nothing changes. “You just threw some seeds on the ground and then you’re shocked they didn’t grow.” The training isn’t the problem. The environment around it is.
What actually develops a leader is being given real challenges with real support, getting honest feedback on a regular basis, and having enough time and space to apply what they’re learning between sessions. Mike is specific here too: adults don’t retain much after 45 to 90 minutes of instruction, so cramming two days of leadership training together and sending someone back to work is not a working development strategy.
The fix is building the conditions where development can actually take root. Areas like expanding someone’s role intentionally while allowing them to job-shadow existing managers, putting coaching in place before and after the stretch, and following up consistently over time rather than doing one big event and calling it done.
The Most Important Step Happens Before the Promotion — and Most Companies Never Do It
One of the most practical things Mike says that almost nobody is actually doing is assessing your people before you make the decision to promote them.
Most companies promote based on performance reviews and gut feel. And while those things are helpful, they really only tell you how someone performed in their current role. They don’t tell you whether that person is ready to lead others in a new one, and that’s a completely different skill set.
What actually works is a high-quality personality assessment combined with a 360-degree feedback review, done right before a promotion. “You do both of those things together and you’re going to get so much rich information,” Mike says. You’ll get answers to questions like: Is this person resistant to feedback? How will their direct reports actually experience them? Are they a strong executor or a big-picture thinker? Where are the blind spots they can’t see in themselves?
That information doesn’t just predict success. It gives the person being promoted a roadmap for what they need to work on before they’re fully in the new role. Done right, it turns a promotion from a leap of faith into an informed decision with a development plan built in. And to be clear, this isn’t about holding someone back (we all have things to work on!). It’s about setting them up to actually succeed in the new role.
We go much deeper on the 360 review process and why it matters in this blog, if you want to take a closer look.
Management Shouldn’t Be the Only Path Forward
One of the main reasons companies feel forced to promote top performers into management is simple: it’s the only path to more money, more recognition, and more advancement.
Many companies don’t have an alternative “Senior Individual Contributor” track — essentially, a career ladder that rewards being exceptional at the work itself without requiring them to manage other people. So the best performers either get promoted into roles they’re not suited for, or they eventually leave for somewhere that offers a more senior position with better pay.
If your company doesn’t have this mapped out yet, it’s worth taking the time to do so. And it doesn’t have to be complicated either. Start by defining what “senior” or “principal” means for individual contributors in your key roles: what skills, what impact, what earnings potential. For instance, maybe they can work on more advanced, higher-paying activities that justify the higher compensation.
Another option is offering lateral moves to grow different skills within the company. Just be explicit with your people that there are multiple ways to grow here, not just the one that requires direct reports.
The effort here is smaller than you think, with a pretty significant payoff. You stop losing exceptional contributors who don’t want to manage. You stop putting the wrong people into management because you felt like you had to reward them somehow. And you give people a real reason to stay and go deeper in their craft rather than chasing a title that isn’t the right fit for them.
The Environment Matters as Much as the Training
There are actually two environment problems you may have never considered.
The first is the work environment your new manager returns to after any development experience. If you invest in training someone to lead differently — to delegate more, to have harder conversations, to coach instead of micromanage — and then send them back into a team where leadership above them still operates the old way, those new behaviors don’t stick. They can’t. People revert to what the environment rewards, not what the training taught. As Mike puts it, “You can’t send someone to rehab and then put them back in the exact same environment and expect things to be different.”
The fix here is top-down reinforcement. If you’re asking a new manager to operate differently, the leaders above them have to model and support that shift too. That means being explicit about what’s changing and why, holding regular check-ins that reinforce the new behaviors, and making sure the rest of the leadership team isn’t accidentally pulling in the opposite direction. Development only compounds when the environment around it is aligned.
The second environment problem is about where development actually happens. Many manager programs fall short because they happen in the same conference room, with the same people. The training often doesn’t stick because nothing about the experience was memorable.
What works is breaking the frame entirely. Getting people out of their usual environment and into something different and disruptive to the daily norms. For instance, Hoops coaches take teams to historical sites like Gettysburg to study strategy under pressure and Dealey Plaza in Dallas to work through decision-making in uncertain circumstances. These unique, applicable offsites create a shared language and memory that teams bring back into their work and keep referencing long after the session ends. Remember how you (or your kids) came home completely different after those weeklong summer camps? It’s essentially the same thing.
Now, you don’t have to go to Gettysburg to make it memorable (another option is local corporate team building facilities). Our argument is you should think beyond the conference room for the training to have its biggest impact. The goal is to give your team an experience they remember together, build a common language around it, and then reinforce it when they’re back in the day-to-day.
What Does a First-Go Manager Development Plan Actually Look Like?
Here’s a practical starting point for building an intentional manager development program:
1. Identify leadership potential early (before a role opens). Don’t just look at who is most senior or who performs best — those people may actually be better suited for individual contributor tracks. Instead, watch for natural leadership instincts: Who helps newer people without being asked? Who stays calm when things go sideways? Who do people go to with problems because they actually feel heard? Those are the people worth developing. If you haven’t mapped out which roles are truly critical yet, this blog is a good place to start.
2. Do a real assessment before the promotion. Conduct a personality assessment and 360 feedback survey beforehand. Use the results to build a development plan that supports that person into their new role. We go much deeper on how to run a meaningful 360 process in this blog.
3. Invest in the right mix of development. Formal training is fine, but it’s only 10% of how leaders actually develop. The other 90% is structured experience with real coaching, shadowing, and feedback — spaced out over time, not crammed into a two-day session. Give people room to apply what they’re learning, fail, and get better. If you want to understand why this matters so much at the senior level, this blog covers it well.
4. Build alternative tracks for exceptional individual contributors. Make it clear, make it achievable, and make it financially incentivizing. Not everyone should be forced to manage others in order to move up.
5. Create immersive, memorable development experiences. Get people out of the conference room. Give your team something to talk about and reference long after the session ends.
6. Give new managers a real runway. Write down what they’re responsible for and what success looks like. Create opportunities for regular, ongoing one-on-ones where there’s real coaching, not just reviewing workloads. Stay close, especially in the first six months. If you’re already seeing signs of a manager struggling to keep momentum, this blog on leadership drag is worth a read.
7. Reinforce new behaviors from the top down. If you’re asking a new manager to operate differently, the leaders above them have to model and support that shift too.
Remember: investing in great managers and leaders is a journey, not a one-time event. When companies treat management development as something that happens once at promotion time, they keep producing the same poor outcomes. But when they treat it as an ongoing multi-month system with assessment, support, and honest feedback built in, that’s when real retention occurs and real results follow.
The Simplest Place to Begin
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