How to Fix the Accidental Manager Crisis

What happens when your best employees become your worst managers? Not because they changed, but because your company didn't prepare them for the new role of a people leader. Across corporate America, we are facing what experts call the accidental manager crisis. Talented professionals are being promoted into leadership roles without the training, mindset, or support to actually lead. As a matter of fact, estimates suggest that in the US alone, between 60% and 80% of new managers and potentially similar or higher percentages of all managers have never had the formal leadership or management training that is needed. The result? Burned-out managers, disengaged teams, and cultures quietly falling apart from the inside.

Welcome to Shedding the Corporate Bitch, the podcast that transforms today's managers into tomorrow's powerhouse leaders. You're Your host, Bernadette Boas, executive coach and author, brings you into a world where the corporate grind meets personal growth and success in each and every episode. Let's do this.

In today's episode, we're breaking down the real cost of promoting unprepared leaders and what HR executives, senior leaders, and corporate professionals can do to fix it. You'll learn how to identify leadership readiness, onboard new managers effectively, and transform accidental bosses into intentional leaders who grow people, performance, and culture. If you care about leadership development, employee engagement, and business success, this episode is your playbook for getting it right before your top talent walks out the door. In my work, I watch too many new managers and long-term managers pulling their hair out trying to figure out what they need to do to bring their people along to achieve the team and business goals. They find people management to be exhausting, emotional, and very trying. On the flip side, look around your team. Look around the teams across the business. Is there someone or someones struggling to manage people, let alone develop, coach, and grow their teams? Look around at your team and teams across the business. Is there someone or a group of individuals that are really struggling to manage their people. What if your best employee becomes your worst manager? And when this happens, too many hiring managers learn too quickly that they actually have created an accidental manager, someone promoted into a leadership role only because they were a top performer, not because they were ready and trained to lead people. The result? It's unfair to the individual, to their team, and to the overall business. So let's break it all down. Let's break down what it costs, how you, HR, and other leaders can fix it and build a better pathway to management that makes everyone successful. So how are accidental managers created? Well, you could probably think of a few. Somebody knows somebody. They fall into it naturally without even choosing it or knowing what it entails, just because there's an opening. It could be because they're being rewarded for their technical or business skill, not necessarily their leadership potential. The one that concerns me the most is when HR and other leaders assume new managers will figure it out as they go. That's the most dangerous for me. Because that's making an assumption that, yes, they're resourceful. Yes, they take initiative. Yes, they have gumption. At the same time, people management and task management are two very different roles and responsibilities. And without the training, without the assimilation, without the proper transition from a doer to a leader, it could set somebody up immediately for failure. That is a very concerning risk in creating an accidental manager. And then also, there is no structure or onboarding or coaching program that will allow them to properly assimilate and properly learn the skills or the gaps in skills that they need. And therefore, they're just left on their own and left adrift. To figure it out by themselves. And that's on the leaders of the company. That's the responsibility. That actually is the accountability of the leaders of the company that need to ensure that they're setting their people up for success from the very beginning. Because the impact on the individuals and teams are too great to overlook. I mean, individuals are going to experience stress. That manager is going to experience imposter syndrome because they're going to question Why are they here? I don't belong here. I'm not capable of doing this. I'm not worthy of being, you know, a people manager. I didn't even want this job, let alone the burnout that could come along with trying to do the job, which they're naturally going to do being an individual contributor to begin with, to then learning and taking on all the people elements of being a team leader. And again, those things are exhausting. They're trying, they're emotionally draining. And along with that comes confusion about priorities, confusion about time management, confusion about delegation, confusion about accountability, confusion about giving critical feedback, because they're kind of stuck in between the doing and leading. And they feel most comfortable in the doing than they do the leading. So where do you think they end up? They end up what their team members are perceiving as micromanaging and dumping, as opposed to delegating and holding one accountable and assessing and reviewing, coaching and developing. And as a result of all that, there's a huge loss of confidence and engagement because of the fact that they're questioning their own capability. And without the training, without the support, without the resources, and being left to kind of figure it out on their own, they start drowning. And ultimately, that will go from an individual impact to a team collective impact in that the team feels neglected, undervalued, micromanaged, dumped on. Their own productivity as a team will drop. And ultimately, the trust between employee and the leader will drop. As a result of a lack of clarity, lack of focus, lack of direction, lack of pathing, lack of overall planning. And that will create turnover, will create burnout, will create stress, will create a toxic culture potentially at the team level. And so there's individual impacts, there's teams impacts, and ultimately all that will lead to business impacts. You'll be dealing with disgruntled employees, so you'll have low manager effectiveness, low employee engagement. All the, all the metrics that you may track around employee satisfaction and productivity will fall in the tank as a result of having an individual who you see as a potential for advancement, potential for promotion, potential for leadership but you provided no foundation for them to ensure that they're successful from the get-go. Or they're in the role for a long period of time, and they've never been given that opportunity for coaching, mentoring, and even leadership development training that would help them start transforming and shifting. And the most impact to that is the new manager is going to be easy to assimilate and transition. Because they've never managed people before. This is new, and they can learn it. The longer term, the one who's ingrained without the training and support, well, they've already started potentially creating a disgruntled, toxic culture and team environment. And undoing that is far more difficult, far more time-consuming, and far more costly for an organization than ensuring that they have those things in place from the get-go. Keep in mind too, people don't quit the company, people quit the manager. You have an accidental manager that isn't given the opportunity for change and transformation, and you're going to lose your top talent, or you're just going to be creating very disgruntled team organizations.. And that will ultimately— everyone will pay the price for that. As you focus on the negatives, the impacts, there are some upsides in taking the time, making the investment, and putting the things in place to create successful managers as opposed to accidental managers. You know, a well-prepared manager becomes a multiplier of performance and morale. They automatically bring the team along with them to achieve goals. The managers that are great and that are really people-focused will reduce that turnover, increase that engagement, improve on the effectiveness of the employees and the manager, and strengthen the culture as opposed to allow it to erode in any way, shape, or form. And investing in those managers turning into leaders creates a very strong pipeline for the future, creates a very large pipeline of high potentials that will also reduce any external hiring needs, therefore costs, and allow you and set yourself up to have a really strong team of succession for taking you into the future. Lastly, I just want to remind everyone This isn't just an HR issue or an HR problem to solve. Every manager/leader in the organization from top to bottom has to take responsibility to ensuring that as they make their people decisions, when it comes to promotions and advancements into people management roles, have to at first consider the readiness of that individual the capacity and the potential of that individual to become a people leader and then provide them the training, support, and foundation that will set themselves up for success, which will ultimately make the team successful and the business successful. It's everyone's responsibility to make sure that happens. And even the corporate professional going from individual contributor to manager, they need to advocate for themselves as to what they need in order to be successful. One, they'll be dealing with the situation of not knowing what they don't know, and therefore making sure that they are even being resourceful to reach out to other individuals who've made that transition, reach out to their HR support person, reach out to their boss, and get them to have a gap analysis or a readiness assessment to determine what training, development, and support that they need, what resources need to be put into place in order for them to be successful, it's as much a responsibility of that individual being promoted as it is the managers and all the other leaders within the organization. So everyone plays a part in making sure that it's a win-win for the entire organization, because fixing the accidental manager problem isn't just prevention, it is a competitive advantage. If you can build that pipeline internally of all these high-functioning, high-performing, high-potential leaders, individual or team leaders, then they're not going anywhere. People are going to want to come into the organization, not leave the organization. And you're going to minimize any risk of when people do leave, that there's a succession that can fill that spot and keep the business moving forward. Without missing a step. So the impacts are huge, but the benefits are large as well. And it's up to every one of the leaders in the organization to really figure out what they need to put into place to minimize the risk and increase the benefits and opportunities. So let's talk about 5 steps that leaders can take to help that transition if you've identified an individual for advancement into a people management role from an individual contributor role, then there's 5 things that you could be doing to make sure that you're successful. The first one being redefine how you promote, meaning ensure that there are some readiness assessments, ensure that there are some conversations, let alone tools that can be used to really gauge the readiness of an individual to move from being tactical to being strategic, move from being a doer to a leader, and assess the capacity that they have for strong communication, clear direction, emotional intelligence, empathy, compassion, understanding, coaching, development, and even their mindset of how do they look at not having to manage people, because again, many find people management exhausting and trying and emotional. And if you just simply ask them upfront, what are their experiences in managing people, whether that's a softball team or their family, it doesn't have to be a work environment if they've never been a people manager. But we're all in some way, shape, or form have had to manage, hold accountable, give feedback, delegate, do all the things of a manager, a work manager in our lives. So you can assess that right up front. You can use leadership assessment tools like the 360 assessment to assess the capability of that individual. And you can just simply ask them, Do you want to be a leader? Do you want to be responsible for people? Do you want to work to develop and grow individuals, team members, and all the complexity that comes along with it? Paint the picture very honestly, brutally transparent, so they understand the complexities of going from just doing tasks to developing and growing individuals. Because it is two whole different worlds that require very different capabilities, very different skills, very different passions toward helping people grow and achieve their own goals versus your own individual goals. The second one would be naturally you need to ensure you have a leadership onboarding program in place prior to positioning an individual into a people management role. What does that look like? What, what do they need to do in the first 30, 60, 90, 120 days? What training, what coaching, what mentoring, what frameworks, what structure do they need to put in place to ensure that they can manage time, prioritize tasks, delegate, hold people accountable, give critical feedback, do performance reviews, develop and coach individuals, a whole structure that will ensure that they have a process, not just a one-off, but a process for becoming a people manager, especially if they've never done it before. And of course, you could be pairing new managers with mentors, people that have been there, done that, not necessarily moving from individual contributor to manager role, but those who have built teams, those who have been successful in dealing with conflict, those who have been successful in dealing with difficult individuals on their team and providing them that support system to guide them and advise them on their next step. And then lastly, you wanna ensure that you're delivering the training and the support long-term, not just a one-and-done type of workshop or one-and-done type of online course. Individuals need to have reinforcement. They need to practice. They need to be reminded time and time again of what it is that they are responsible for doing, let alone the skills and the qualities and traits that they need to have in order to be successful in the role that they're in. So be careful not to look at leadership development training as a one-and-done. Have a longer-term career path plan and program in place that will give them long-term the tools and the resources they need in order to help them and help their team members be the best that they can be in the roles that they have. And then the third one would be look at redefining the success metrics you use when it comes to people development. Consider shifting your performance measurements from being personal outcomes to team outcomes. And what that means is I might have goals of my own that are centered around my contribution. My production, my input to the business, as opposed to my goals around making my team successful, my team to grow, my team to become better at what they do day in and day out. So you really want to rethink how you define your individual performance goals and make them team-focused, team-outcome-focused, as opposed to personal outcomes. Especially the majority of the goals and the measurements I see are all around the hard business metrics—revenue, profit, production, volume, whatever the case might be. And managers really need to be accountable and responsible for developing and growing their teams and the outcomes that those teams generate, that they are high-potential, high-functioning teams. And therefore, you want to redefine those metrics and how you measure them to align with holding them accountable to developing and growing their teams. And you can encourage them to ask themselves questions and/or have their performance review addressing Are my people growing? Can my team perform without me here, or are they dependent on me? Are my team members stretching themselves and developing to the next level? So then I do have that strong pipeline of potential leaders, but also strong individual contributors to carry our business forward into the future. You want to ensure you're redefining the success measurements you're using to be more team-focused than just personal individual-focused. The fourth step you could be taking to really prevent accidental managers is put those processes, those systems, those tools in place that will allow managers, new or long-term, to be able to establish themselves as strong people leaders. Communication templates, communication frameworks, peer groups, performance templates, feedback worksheets to really work through how to give feedback. You could be creating all kinds of tools, processes, and systems that will align to those people goals that you define for an individual manager. And that can lend itself to you developing almost like mastermind leadership communities where they can come together, those that are in similar roles, pretty much people managers, and they can come together to share the problems that they're having and get ideas, get solutions, get challenging conversations to really rethink one's decision-making process, to discuss what is happening in their role, what is happening with their team, and getting insights from third parties that are unbiased, that are objective, that can— that have experienced things and put in place things that may be different, new, bigger, and better than what you've tried. And therefore, it's a great vehicle for expanding one's leadership capacity. And then the other one I was thinking about is it's really important for all leaders to normalize the human side of an organization's leaders. So many employees look at leaders as, you know, they're supposed to be these unbreakable, unemotional robots of leaders who have no insecurities, who have no imposter syndrome, who have no struggles in, in leading the way that they need to. Though they are sitting back complaining about their boss who might not be providing the clarity and the focus and the direction that they need, they still look at leaders as if they don't have those problems, or they shouldn't have those problems. That's why they're in that position to begin with. And yet we're all human. We all have emotions. We all have mental fatigue. We all have breaks in our armor. And therefore, it's really important for organizations to, through their communications and through their programs, to normalize the struggles of leaders. Leaders struggle with psychological safety. Leaders struggle with, leaders struggle with dealing with difficult people and difficult conversations, with conflict, with giving feedback, not very different than those individual employees themselves. And therefore, if organizations can communicate and normalize those struggles, then it brings down the temperature of what their employees are expecting of them. Now, this isn't only just on the organization. This is also on the manager/leader themselves, is to, is to communicate that to the team. Be open and honest and transparent about what their strengths are, but where the gaps are, what they're struggling with, what they're working on, where they excel, but where they can even use their team members' support and team members' feedback on. You know, almost going back to leveraging 360s. If one were to do a 360 or even a DiSC assessment and learn more and more and more about their individual style and the perception and experience others have with them, sharing that and being vulnerable to that with your team members will create a major shift and a major transformation in how your team members view you. And so as opposed to feeling as if, oh no, I can't, You know, I can't show them that I am scared or weak or struggling in any way, shape, or form. Being human, being vulnerable is actually very, very enticing and very welcoming from team members. And so give it a shot sometime and see how your team members respond and ask them for support. Ask them for feedback. Ask them to be part of your own growth. Just as they may have training and development and areas of growth that they need to focus on, and they need support and help, communicate the same in regards to your own path and seek that support and feedback from them as well. And I think you'll be pleasantly surprised at how open and willing they are to provide that support. And then lastly, number 5 would be organizations have to hold their leaders accountable for developing their people. I review dozens of performance reviews at the end of each year and mid-year. And a handful of them will have individual people management goals, as I mentioned earlier, when we were talking about redefining your success metrics. But I'll have— very few have very measurable, SMART-oriented people management goals that they are actually tracking to, measuring, and reporting, and then being compensated for, plus or minus, based on their performance. And I communicate often all the way up the food chain of an organization how critical it is for the organization to have each and every one of their leaders define, track, measure, report, and be compensated with people management goals. Whether or not their teams are growing, whether or not their, their teams are successful, whether or not their teams are effective, whether or not there's a, you know, trust-based culture, whether or not they're high functioning, or maybe they're even medium functioning, working their way. But it's critical to make sure you tie engagement and growth metrics to leaders' performance reviews and their compensation, a plus or a minus. And trust me when I say, hit the wallet and you will motivate individuals to make change. But if you avoid it or ignore it, then don't expect anything to change. If they're not being held accountable and it's hitting their wallet, plus or minus. And then lastly, it kind of layering on top of that is be sure that you are rewarding behaviors that do build teams, that do build people, that you're just not rewarding the numbers— revenue, profit, production, volume, cost, whatever those hard numbers are. Don't only reward that. That sends a really bad message that it's not important that they are people leaders. It's just important that they are doer leaders. And that is not what's going to allow you and your organization to grow and advance into the future. Reward the behaviors of building the people, of building that number one asset everyone says a company has. That being its people, ensure that everyone is focused on working toward building high-functioning, high-performing, high-potential teams, because that will just create a win-win for everyone in the long run. I want to give you one bonus step you could be taking. And that would be get creative. Not everyone wants to be or should be a people leader. That individual contributor, that technical expert, or even a business expert who has hit a ceiling, and they're looking for another opportunity. And they think that naturally, it's that next step of being a people leader. When in actuality, if you were to do those assessments, if you were to identify really where their strength lies, it could be in an individual contributor role. However, you need to get creative as far as what could that role be? What could you be creating in a position that would stretch, challenge, and provide everything that this individual is looking for, including a bigger title, bigger paycheck, bigger benefits, whatever the case might be. But get creative. Don't just assume future opportunities on a career path have to be into a people manager role. Because again, some individuals are just not cut out, or they don't even want to be managing people, and it would be unfair to them that that's the only option. That's the only path that they have. So your last bonus tip would be get creative as far as what you could be creating for that individual to remain as an individual contributor, but have all the elements of what would challenge them and what would excite them and inspire them and get them to be contributing greater, richer for the team and the organization. A call to action for you this week is to spend time assessing your current management pipeline. Maybe it's on your team or across teams. And ask yourself, are my managers leading intentionally, or are they surviving accidentally? Are they thriving, or are they just surviving? And what do they need to ensure that they're not only in the right position to be powerhouse people leaders, not accidental managers. All right. And share the episode with other leaders or your HR colleagues who could be dealing with accidental managers, or they're preparing to promote a well-deserving individual, and yet you want to help them ensure that they're making the right decision. And I'd love to hear from you. So connect with me on LinkedIn @BernadetteBoas, or drop a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. Your feedback not only fuels this community, but it helps other leaders find the show as well. And as a tickler, our next episode will be with guest Kendra McDonald. She's the CEO of Canada's Ocean Supercluster, and she's going to be joining us to discuss how vulnerability is a superpower in leadership. So you're not going to want to miss it. So be sure you subscribe and follow the show on any one of your podcast streaming services or on our Shed the Corporate Bitch YouTube channel. And you can always go to ballofirecoaching.com/podcast to join and follow us on any one of those platforms as well. Lastly, if you are in any way struggling to define an onboarding program, to create those people management goals and measurements, or to understand what you need to do to help an accidental manager, then be sure to reach out to me and let's have a 30-minute conversation. You can go to coachmebernadette.com/discoverycall and let's just talk. And I will leave you with some next steps you could be taking so you and them are those powerhouse leaders you deserve to be.

I'll see you next time. Thank you for tuning in to today's episode of Shedding the Corporate Bitch. Every journey taken together is another step towards unleashing the powerhouse leader within you. Don't miss any of our weekly episodes. Subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you love to listen. And for those who thrive on visual content, catch us on our Shedding the Bitch YouTube channel. Want to dive deeper with Bernadette on becoming a powerhouse leader? Visit balloffirecoaching.com to learn more about how she helps professionals, HR executives, and team leaders elevate overall team performance. You've been listening to Shedding the Corporate Bitch with Bernadette Boas. Until next time, keep shedding, keep growing, and keep leading.