Manager Training Is a Band-Aid, Not a Leadership Strategy

Manager Training Is a Band-Aid, Not a Leadership Strategy

In a recent webinar, I was asked a question that comes up far more often than we admit:

“An employee has stagnated at their current level but isn’t ready or willing to manage a team. What should I do?”

Most organisations I speak to are grappling with this exact challenge. We have strong individual contributors who don’t want to manage people, don’t feel confident doing it, or simply don’t find meaning in it. And yet, our default response is almost always the same:
Promote them into people management and enrol them in a first-time manager training program.

On paper, this feels like growth.
In reality, it’s often just a band-aid.

The flawed assumption about growth

In many organisations, growth is implicitly defined as:

Do your individual contributor (IC) role well + manage two people.

People management gets bundled in as a responsibility to justify the promotion.

But leadership isn’t a side quest.
Managing people is not a “by-the-way” responsibility.

Some people have a genuine skill and desire to lead teams. Others are exceptional individual contributors who thrive in deep problem-solving, craft, and execution. When we force great ICs into people management roles they neither want nor are prepared for, three things usually happen:

• Their own work quality suffers
• Their teams don’t get the support they need
• Growth stalls for everyone involved

The uncomfortable truth about good managers

There are some very intrinsic skills that make someone a good people manager:
high emotional intelligence, composure, patience, empathy, and self-awareness.

Some folks are naturally gifted with these traits and pick up people management fairly easily.

For others, becoming a good manager requires deep unlearning and relearning letting go of control, shifting identity, and redefining what ‘impact’ looks like. This isn’t just L&D’s responsibility. It’s as much on the individual and the organisation to create the space for that transition.

And if someone is constantly juggling IC responsibilities alongside managing a team, guess which one usually wins?

The work that’s measurable, urgent, and visible, their IC work. Not their people. IC work also gives people a high sense of control over the outcomes and hence perceived security over their success. 

Maybe it’s not two paths, but three

We already understand this well in engineering careers, and it’s worth borrowing from that playbook.

Instead of forcing a binary choice, there are often three meaningful growth paths:

1. Pure IC: deep expertise and execution (think senior engineers, designers, marketers)
2. IC + mentorship: higher leverage through coaching and technical or functional leadership (similar to staff or principal roles)
3. People management: full ownership of team health, performance, and development

This applies to almost all forms of knowledge work, engineering, design, sales, marketing, creative roles, especially work that doesn’t scale linearly.

Different people create value in different ways. Career paths should reflect that, while still making business sense.

Why manager training alone doesn’t work

Most manager training programs focus on:

• Delegation
• Giving feedback
• Having “tough conversations”

These are important skills, but they barely scratch the surface.

People are complex. Performance issues are rarely just about skills, they’re about confidence, context, motivation, identity, and belonging. Today’s workforce wants to bring their whole selves to work. They don’t want cookie-cutter managers who simply prescribe “the right way” to do a job.

No five-week training program can build the emotional maturity and nuance required to navigate complex human situations especially when managers don’t have the time or headspace to actually practice those skills.

Managing people well requires focus.
And focus requires letting go of competing IC expectations.

The shift organizations need to make

For any of this to truly work, organizations need to value people management as a skill in itself and make it aspirational.

This is often where the system quietly breaks down.

Many leaders, unintentionally, devalue this skill. They reward managers who “get the work done,” even if they don’t coach, mentor, or develop their teams. Over time, this sends a very clear message: people's leadership is secondary.

If we want stronger teams, healthier cultures, and sustainable performance, that mindset has to change.

Because not everyone should be a manager.
And the ones who deserve the time, trust, and respect to do the job well.

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