At Career Moves, we’ve been having some interesting conversations about leadership development, particularly the gap between what managers know they should do and what actually happens when they’re under pressure.
It’s a topic we’ve recently been exploring with Eleanor Manuel, Leadership Development Consultant & Coach, who brings a wealth of practical experience from working in People & Culture.
One question that keeps coming up is: Are we setting managers up to succeed when we promote them into leadership roles?
In this thought-provoking article, Eleanor explores why being a strong individual performer doesn’t automatically translate into being an effective people manager, and what organisations need to think about differently.
Table of Contents
Why knowing what to do isn’t always enough when you start leading people.
It took me years to understand my own brain and behaviours, and to be honest, I had to learn a lot of it the hard way. I experienced anxiety, overthinking and worrying about what “might” happen, whether I had got something wrong or whether I should have handled a situation differently. I would avoid things that needed to be said because I was worried about how the other person might react, and although I often knew logically what I should do, that didn’t mean I was always able to do it.
The more I started to understand about psychology, mindset and behaviour, the more I realised how much our internal world influences what happens externally, particularly when we are responsible for leading other people.
One of the biggest things I came to understand was how much we create our own experience of an environment through the stories we tell ourselves about what is happening. That doesn’t mean difficult situations aren’t real, or that we can simply think our way out of every problem, but we rarely respond only to the facts in front of us. We respond to what we think those facts mean.
For example, a fairly neutral message can quickly become something we feel threatened by because we have decided the person is annoyed with us, questioning us or being disrespectful. We then respond to that interpretation rather than the message itself, perhaps by becoming defensive or withdrawing. The other person then reacts to our response and suddenly the story we originally created feels as though it has been proven right.
The message itself may never have been the real problem, but the meaning we attached to it helped create the outcome we were worried about.
Being good at the work doesn’t automatically prepare someone to lead people
This is why understanding the basics of human psychology should be a much bigger part of leadership development, particularly before someone starts managing a team.
People are often promoted because they are brilliant at their jobs. They are technically capable, reliable and know how to deliver, so the natural next step is to give them more responsibility and a team to manage.
But being good at the work and being able to lead the people doing the work require very different things.
Once someone becomes a manager, they are expected to give feedback, manage different personalities, address performance issues, delegate work they could probably complete more quickly themselves and make decisions other people may not like.
They also have to manage their own emotions while helping other people manage theirs, which is a significant shift from being responsible mainly for their own performance.
We tend to teach new managers practical tools such as Situational Leadership, feedback frameworks and delegation models, and these things are important.
The problem is that knowing a feedback framework doesn’t necessarily help someone use it when the person sitting opposite them becomes upset or defensive.
The frameworks tell managers what to do, but they don’t always help them understand what is happening internally when they find it difficult to do it.
When a manager keeps avoiding a difficult conversation, it is easy to assume they need more training on how to give feedback, but they may already know exactly how to structure the conversation.
What they might not understand is why they keep putting it off.
They may be worried the person will become upset and they won’t know how to handle it, uncomfortable with the idea that someone may leave the conversation feeling unhappy with them or questioning whether they have the right to raise it at all.
Similarly, a manager who repeatedly takes work back may understand delegation perfectly well, but feel anxious when they aren’t in control or believe their value comes from being the person who solves everything.
when knowing better doesn’t mean doing better
Until we understand what is sitting underneath the behaviour, another framework will only address part of the problem.
For example, a manager notices that someone in their team is repeatedly missing deadlines but worries that raising it will damage the relationship.
They soften the message, offer more support and quietly absorb some of the work themselves.
Three months later, the performance issue is more established, the manager is frustrated and the People team is asked to begin a formal process.
The manager may have known how to give feedback all along; what they struggled with was acting when the conversation still felt uncomfortable but the problem was much easier to resolve.
This matters because our internal patterns don’t only affect us once we are leading other people.
If I avoid giving feedback, the person in my team doesn’t get the opportunity to improve.
If I become defensive whenever someone challenges me, people will eventually stop being honest with me.
If I constantly rescue my team when something becomes difficult, they learn that I will step in and solve it for them.
If I redo work because it isn’t exactly how I would have approached it, I teach people that I don’t really trust them to own it.
What feels easier or safer for the manager in the moment can create a much bigger issue later.
When these patterns continue across a management population, the impact becomes bigger than one uncomfortable conversation: feedback is delayed, performance issues become harder to resolve, senior leaders are pulled back into operational detail and People teams become the escalation point for situations that could have been handled much earlier.
So if a manager already knows what they should be doing, the question becomes: what actually helps them change the behaviour?
Why more management training isn’t always the answer.
Understanding ourselves helps us lead other people better Self-awareness can make managers more curious about the behaviour around them.
Instead of immediately deciding that someone is lazy, difficult or defensive, they can ask whether expectations were clear, feedback was given early enough or the person understood what good looked like.
This isn’t about explaining away poor performance or removing accountability; it helps managers address issues earlier and respond to what is actually happening before frustration builds and the situation becomes personal.
Agency changes the way we lead
Understanding our own patterns is one thing. Recognising that we have choices about how we respond to them is another.
Another thing that changed the way I worked was realising how much agency I had.
If I didn’t like something, instead of only complaining about it, I started asking myself what I could personally do to change it. Could I share some feedback, have a conversation with someone who could influence the decision or try something different within my own team?
This didn’t mean pretending everything was fine or taking responsibility for things that weren’t mine. It was recognising that even when I couldn’t change the wider situation, I could usually make a choice about what I did next.
This becomes even more important when someone is leading a team because people are looking to their manager to understand how they should respond.
Managers may not be able to control the whole organisation, but they have a significant amount of influence over the environment their own team experiences.
So what does better leadership development look like?
New leaders absolutely need practical tools.
But they also need the space and support to understand themselves, practise what they are learning and reflect on what happens when they try to apply it.
When a manager is struggling, there are three questions People Leaders and senior leaders can ask before deciding what support they need:
- Is this a skills gap? Do they genuinely know how to handle the situation?
- Is there an internal barrier? What are they worried will happen if they act?
- Is the environment reinforcing the problem? Are unclear authority, senior leader behaviour or the wider culture making action harder?
For me, effective leadership development has to cover three connected areas: how leaders manage themselves, how they lead other people and how they shape the environment around them.
Leadership is tested when a conversation becomes uncomfortable, somebody reacts in a way they didn’t expect or they have to make a decision without knowing for certain that it is the right one.
That’s when mindset, self-awareness and an understanding of human behaviour become just as important as the practical management tools we have traditionally relied on.
Because developing better managers isn’t always about teaching them something new. Sometimes it’s about helping them understand what’s preventing them from doing what they already know.
About the author
Eleanor Manuel is a Leadership Development Consultant & Coach with over 10 years’ experience in People & Culture roles.
Passionate about helping managers become more confident and effective leaders, Eleanor focuses on bridging the gap between leadership theory and what happens in practice. Her work explores the human side of management, particularly how pressure, emotions and ingrained behaviours can influence the way people lead.
