I want to share something I see regularly in organisations that are struggling to perform, and it might surprise you.
The strategy is sound and the market opportunity is real. The senior leadership team is capable and committed; however, somewhere between the boardroom and the frontline, something is going wrong. Performance is inconsistent, good people are leaving and HR cases are piling up. The leadership team keeps firefighting problems that should have been caught earlier, or should not have happened at all.
In the vast majority of cases, when I dig into what is actually going on, I find the same thing – the managers in the middle are not equipped to do the job they are being asked to do. Not because they are the wrong people, but because nobody ever taught them how to manage, or equip them with the skills to step into a management role.
The promotion problem
Here is how it usually happens. Someone is excellent at their job, they are reliable, motivated and capable. They then get promoted into a management role, and suddenly, the skills that made them outstanding as an individual contributor are almost entirely irrelevant.
Being a great manager requires a completely different skill set. It requires the ability to have performance conversations that are honest without being unkind, to give feedback that changes behaviour rather than just creating defensiveness, to delegate effectively without losing accountability, to spot when someone on the team is struggling before it becomes a crisis and to hold a team together through uncertainty and change.
None of these are skills that people develop simply by being good at their previous job – they are skills that need to be taught, practised, and supported over time.
The hidden cost of undertrained managers
The cost of poor management is rarely visible on a spreadsheet. But it is everywhere if you know where to look:
- Employee relations cases that could have been resolved in a conversation six months earlier.
- High performers walking out the door because their manager does not develop them, recognise them, or challenge them.
- Absence and wellbeing issues that escalate because the manager did not have the confidence to have an early, caring conversation.
- Teams that work hard but not in the same direction, because nobody has set clear expectations or connected daily work to organisational goals.
- Leaders who are so busy managing upwards and firefighting downwards that they have no capacity for the strategic thinking their role actually requires.
I have seen all of these in organisations I have worked with. I have also seen their opposites – in organisations that invest deliberately in building management capability…and the difference is stark.
When I joined an organisation in a senior operational leadership role, I inherited a team that had been the lowest-performing nationally. Within three months of focused management development – performance conversations, accountability structures, feedback frameworks, consistent standards – engagement scores had improved by 10%. Quality metrics went from 78% to 97.5%. The people did not change, the way they were managed and led did.
The quality of management and leadership in your organisation is not an HR issue. It is an operational issue. It is a strategic issue. It is a risk issue. And it is entirely within your control.
What good management development actually looks like
I am not talking about sending your managers on a two-day course, ticking a box and wishing them luck. I have seen that approach too many times, and I have seen it achieve very little too many times.
The management development that actually changes behaviour has three characteristics:
Characteristic 1: It is practical, not theoretical
Frameworks are useful. But frameworks without practice do not change behaviour. The managers I work with practise the skills in the room through real conversations, real scenarios, real feedback from peers and from me. They leave each session with one specific action they have committed to doing before the next, and we review it.
The research is clear on this: skills that are not practised within 72 hours of a training session are largely lost. The design of the learning has to account for how human beings actually retain and apply new knowledge – not just how efficiently the content can be delivered.
Characteristic 2: It is differentiated by level
A Team Leader managing individual contributors in an operational role has different needs to a Service Manager managing other managers. Putting them in the same room and giving them the same content is a waste of everyone’s time.
Team Leaders need the fundamentals: how to set expectations, have performance conversations, delegate effectively, handle difficult situations without escalating unnecessarily. Service Managers need a more strategic lens: how to develop the leaders below them, how to set consistent standards across a service area, how to make good decisions under pressure and communicate them clearly upwards and sideways.
Both are important. Both require different content, different depth, and a different facilitation approach.
Characteristic 3: It is sustained, not one-off
You cannot develop management capability in a single day. You can start the conversation. You can introduce frameworks and spark self-awareness, but real behaviour change requires time, repetition, and follow-through.
The most effective management development programmes I have designed and delivered run over a period of months – with regular sessions, between-session application, peer reflection, and a structured evaluation that measures not just satisfaction scores, but actual behaviour change in the workplace.
Where to start
If you are reading this and recognising your organisation – whether it is in the ER cases, the retention challenges, the firefighting, or simply the sense that your strategy is not landing the way it should – here is what I would suggest.
Start with an honest conversation about your managers – not a performance review – an honest exploration of what they are finding hard, what they have never been taught, and what support they need to do their jobs properly. You will learn more in those conversations than in any engagement survey.
Then build a programme that meets them where they are – not where you wish they were. One that takes the skills they need seriously enough to give them the time, the practice, and the follow-through that behaviour change actually requires.
The return on that investment is not soft or fluffy. It is measurable, it is significant, and it shows up in the places that matter: retention, performance, ER case volumes, team engagement, and the quality of operational delivery across your organisation.
Your managers are not your biggest operational risk, undertrained managers are. The distance between those two things is entirely within your power to address.
At Opexcell, we design and deliver management development programmes that build the skills, confidence, and capability your managers need to genuinely lead their teams. If you would like to explore what that could look like for your organisation, I would love to have a conversation.
