Stop making first-time line managers wing it

For most of your people, their line manager is the human interface of your organisation.  

It’s not your monthly Townhalls, nor your carefully crafted Viva Engage content or even your CEO videos. It’s the person they interact with every week, who shapes their day-to-day experience and ultimately determines whether they feel supported and valued, or underappreciated. 

Line managers are meant to help us develop, clarify what’s expected of us, advocate for us. That’s big pressure (on top of an already burgeoning project stack), and a real risk if done poorly: teams underperforming, morale plummeting, and ultimately people walking out the door. The saying ‘people don’t leave jobs, they leave managers,’ is a cliché with a lot of truth in it. 

We’re setting new managers up to fail 

One would think we’d be incredibly careful about who becomes a line manager and how we set them up for success, no? 

Yet people are promoted or hired into these critical roles often without a proper foundation. It’s assumed they’ll figure it out. That they’ll learn what good leadership looks like at your organisation through trial and error, or perhaps it’ll come to them in a dream via a visit from The Ghost of Good Leadership (one of Dickens’ lesser-known characters).  

New managers feel like they’ve been thrown in the deep end. They’re unclear on what good looks like. They’re making it up as they go along, reverting to management styles they’ve experienced themselves (which may or may not have been effective).  

Friends have told me how they felt going into roles like this:  

“Totally overwhelmed and underprepared. No training whatsoever. I worried constantly about making the team happy and questioned were they fulfilled, whilst trying to deliver one of the biggest internal programmes of work the business had ever done.” 

“I first became a line manager 11 years ago. I had a team of three, there wasn’t any formal training or support. I worked for a national newspaper, and it was very much in the work hard, play hard era. You were just expected to get on with it. I do ask myself, ‘Am I giving enough support, enough constructive feedback, enough room for people to grow. Am I setting a good example?’” 

I’m sensing a bunch of stunned mullets who entered roles that necessitate confidence while they were still finding their footing. The knock-on effect is an employee experience that varies wildly across the business, depending on which manager someone happens to report to. A risk no one wants to take.  

It’s not that new managers don’t care 

Think about someone getting their first promotion to managing people… the excitement and enthusiasm, wanting to do a good job, have an impact, prove oneself, grow in one’s career. Most new managers genuinely want to support their teams and get this right. 

It’s that organisations don’t do a good enough job at explaining the role or giving them what they need to succeed in it. Here’s what you can do. 

5 things your organisation needs to get right 

1. Be clear about what‘good’ looks like 

Most organisations have leadership frameworks, but these might skip over the practical, day-to-day behaviors that make someone a good line manager in your organisation. What does a good 1:1 look like here? How do we get the best out of our people? Get specific and help people know what it looks like in practice with real-life examples. 

2. Focus on human skills, and let people practice

New managers don’t need more systems training; they need help to develop the human skills that matter. Coaching, unlocking potential, creating psychological safety, having difficult conversations, giving fearless feedback, managing team dynamics. And crucially, they need safe opportunities to practice before it really counts. 

3. Show that leadership really cares

When senior leaders visibly support new line managers, it tells them that this role really matters. It also takes the guesswork out, so new managers understand what’s expected of them and trust that the behaviours they’re encouraged to show will be valued across the organisation. 

4. Don’t let new managers do this alone 

Moving into line management can be isolating. Creating communities where new managers can share experiences, compare notes and solve problems together builds their confidence and a sense of belonging. 

5. Design the experience with new managers, not just for them 

The people who’ve just stepped into the role have the freshest perspective on what’s working and what’s not. Create ways to capture their insights (What’s confusing? Where are the gaps?) and actually use what you learn so the experience improves over time. 

On their own, none of these ideas are new. But with our clients, we’ve seen how much more powerful they become when they’re felt together, early and deliberately, as part of a coherent experience for new line managers. 

What if we reimagined the onboarding experience for new line managers? Not as a one-off training moment, but as a proper developmental journey that gives people the tools, support and confidence they need. One that starts before someone steps into the role and continues well beyond their first few months. 

Your line managers are translating strategy into reality. They’re the ones having the career conversations, spotting when someone’s struggling and creating the conditions for people to do their best work. If you want your EVP to match the lived experience, if you want your people strategy to work, you need to invest in the people who bring it to life every day.  

Don’t risk them winging it. Give your line managers what they need from day 1.