I was lucky. When I first stepped into a manager role, the company had a formal training program.
HR ran most of it and the content hadn’t changed much in a decade. But it existed. There was a binder, a schedule, and a few case studies with outdated names.
It wasn’t perfect, but someone, somewhere, had at least tried to prepare new managers for what was coming.
A few years later, I transferred to the U.S. to build and lead a new team. That’s when I realized my experience wasn’t standard.
Someone in our department got promoted into a manager role. As you would expect he was sharp, respected and ready. His training? A congratulatory email and a copy of “The One Minute Manager”. That was it.
Same company. Different continent. But here, any formal leadership support started at Director level and above.
I watched him struggle through the early weeks. Not because he lacked skill or effort, but because everything was guesswork. Feedback conversations, delegation, even understanding what success looked like in the role. No one had covered it.
That’s when I realized: Most managers aren’t bad. They’re just undertrained.
So today, I want to show you a simple way to spot the real problem. And stop blaming yourself for a mess you didn’t design.
Busy is not the job
Most new managers don’t start with a playbook.
They start with a meeting invite and a calendar full of recurring check-ins they didn’t create.
So we compensate. We say yes to everything. We over-explain. We micromanage one person and ignore another. We confuse responsiveness with presence. We use process as a substitute for clarity.
And if we’re responsible, we try to self-correct. Read a blog post. Ask a mentor. Try that thing we heard on a podcast. Sometimes it helps. Usually, it just makes us feel behind.
Beyond the buzzwords
“Just lead how you’d want to be led.”
“Sink or swim builds resilience.”
“Fake it till you make it.”
None of these hold up in the real world, where context matters and authority is blurry.
Leading how you want to be led doesn’t work when your team isn’t you. Sink or swim is a great way to build distrust and turnover. Faking it? People notice. They just stop telling you things.
And yet, this is what we give new managers in place of real support: platitudes and vibes.
It’s not you. It’s the system.
Most managers aren’t underperforming. They were undertrained.
It’s not a talent problem. It’s a systems problem.
And pretending it’s about “natural leadership skills” is like hiring a pilot, skipping flight school, and being surprised when they crash into a mountain.
We don’t expect engineers to code without a tech stack. We don’t expect surgeons to wing it.
But with managers? We assume they’ll just figure it out eventually - while managing risk, emotions, people, and output. At scale and in real time.
No other job asks so much with so little preparation.
While you wait for the system to catch up
A few things that helped me
Keep a “What Actually Matters” list. When everything feels urgent, it’s not. Write the 3-5 things your team actually needs from you this week. Stick to that. Everything else is noise or guilt.
Treat questions like tools. You don’t have to know. But you do need to ask. “What do you need from me this week?” will get you further than pretending you already know.
Use your calendar like a highlighter. What you make time for signals what you value. Are you reinforcing important stuff or just surviving meetings?
Don’t confuse being nice with being clear. You can be kind and direct. Clarity is care, especially when the stakes are messy.
Find one peer to compare notes with. Not to vent. To calibrate. Half the time, what feels like failure is just... normal.
The bottom line
Most new managers don’t fail because they’re bad at the job.
They fail because they were never taught how to do the job in the first place.
And if you’re in that position - leading by accident, unsure if you’re allowed to say what you don’t know - you’re not alone.
No one’s coming with the manual.
But you can stop pretending one was ever given to you.
See you next week.