Your best account manager gets promoted to lead the team. It’s the obvious decision: they’ve outperformed for three years, they know the clients, and the team respects them.
Nine months later, the numbers are down, two people have left, and the person you promoted is working longer hours than anyone while silently wondering whether they’ve ruined a good career.
Why it keeps happening
The promotion wasn’t a mistake so much as a category error. Being excellent at commercial delivery and being able to get commercial delivery out of other people are different jobs, drawing on different skills, and one doesn’t predict the other.
The scale of this is well documented. Research by the Chartered Management Institute and YouGov found that 82% of people entering management positions have had no formal management or leadership training — the “accidental managers” of the title. The same research found that workers who rate their manager as ineffective are far more likely to be planning to leave within 12 months: 50%, against 21% of those with an effective manager.
So the cost isn’t confined to the person struggling in the role. It shows up in the retention numbers of everyone reporting to them.
Why this matters more from January
From 1 January 2027, the qualifying period for ordinary unfair dismissal is expected to drop from two years to six months, with the compensation cap removed. Managing performance badly stops being an HR irritation and becomes a financial exposure.
CMI polling suggests most managers aren’t ready: nearly half have had no formal training or guidance on the Employment Rights Act 2025. If your first-line managers can’t run a fair process, document it, and have a difficult conversation early, that gap gets expensive next year.
Spotting it before you hire
Most of this is preventable at the point of appointment, whether you’re promoting internally or hiring in. Useful signals:
- Ask what they stopped doing when they took on a team. Someone who describes carrying their own client load alongside managing hasn’t yet made the transition, and usually knows it.
- Ask about someone they managed out. You’re looking for evidence of a process, not a war story. Vagueness here is the strongest single warning sign.
- Ask what their team achieved without them in the room. Managers who can only describe their own contributions will keep doing the work themselves.
- Ask them to describe a person they developed who overtook them. The best answers are specific and slightly proud. Weaker candidates find the question uncomfortable.
What to do if you’ve already made the appointment
It’s recoverable more often than people assume, and the fix is rarely a training course on its own.
Reduce the individual workload first. Most struggling new managers are still carrying a full personal target, so the management work happens in the evenings and gets done badly. Then give them a specific, near-term thing to get right, such as running weekly one-to-ones properly for a quarter, rather than a general instruction to lead better.
And be honest about the alternative. Some of your strongest commercial people don’t want to manage and shouldn’t have to. A senior individual contributor track, with real pay parity, keeps people who would otherwise leave because the only route up ran through a job they didn’t want.
Get the appointment right first time
We recruit commercial and professional services leadership, and a good part of that work is helping clients decide whether a role genuinely needs a manager, and what to test for if it does.
If you’ve got a team that isn’t performing and you’re not sure whether the answer is a new hire, a restructure or some support for the person already in post, talk it through with us.
