The accidental manager

Iʼve been an accidental manager. I’ve also been managed by one. Neither experience was perfect and I’m sure there are people I’ve managed who would happily remind me of some of the things I got wrong along the way. But perhaps that’s the point. We talk about management as though people either are good managers or they aren’t, as though some people naturally know how to lead people and everyone else is destined to spend their working life muddling through. I don’t believe that.

I think most people become managers in much the same way I did: they were good at something else first. They were the person who delivered, hit the number, solved the problem, took responsibility when things went wrong or became the person everyone trusted when something needed sorting out. Then, at some point, someone looked at all of that and said, “I think you’d make a great manager.” And off they went.

No handbook, no satnav and usually not much of a map either. Just a new title, a team of people looking at them and the slightly uncomfortable realisation that being good at the job is very different from being good at helping other people do the job.

And honestly, I think we need to be a little kinder about that.

What is an accidental manager?

The accidental manager as we recognise them is someone who steps into management without having been properly prepared for it. They get there because they were already doing well. They're what you might call a "high-performer". They delivered consistently, solved problems, took responsibility and became someone the business trusted. And so the story goes, when a team needed leading, they were the obvious person to promote.

The difficulty comes with how much the job changes at that point. Management brings a new set of requirements: delegating well, giving useful feedback, handling difficult conversations, developing people and helping a team perform consistently amongst many other responsibilities. For many new managers, those skills are learned as they navigate the role for the first time. And that leaves a lot of people learning through experience, all while carrying the full responsibility of managing a team and being expected to do both sides of the job well.

How we create accidental managers

This statistic gets quoted a lot: 82% of UK managers have never received any formal management training. The figure comes from CMI’s Better Management Report: Taking Responsibility - Why UK plc Needs Better Managers, published on 15 October 2023. Conducted in partnership with YouGov, the research explored the impact of management quality on individuals, organisations and wider society.

It’s a number that is still widely cited today, and for good reason because the underlying point is difficult to argue with. We have millions of people responsible for other people’s working lives who were never really taught how to do it.

I don’t think that makes them bad managers. It makes them under-equipped and there is an important difference between the two. Nobody really applies to become a manager. You apply to be good at your job. You become the person who can be relied upon, you get results, you know your stuff and you become the one people go to when something is on fire. So when the business grows, a team needs leading or someone leaves, the obvious person to turn to is often you. It makes perfect sense.

It’s also where things start to go wrong. Because being excellent at something and being excellent at helping other people become excellent at it are two completely different capabilities. We still tend to treat management as the next step in someone’s career rather than as a different job altogether, and then we’re surprised when someone who was brilliant as an individual contributor struggles when their success suddenly depends on ten other people. I donʼt think they failed. I think we changed the job and forgot to change the level of support we give them.

The signs of an accidental manager

There is something very British about muddling through. “I’m just figuring it out.” “We’ll get there.” “It’s fine.” “I’ll work it out.” There’s something quite admirable about it, actually. We are resilient, we don’t like making a fuss and we like to get on with things. But muddling through is only useful for a while. Eventually, the things you haven’t been taught start showing up in the way you manage and they are often surprisingly easy to spot once you know what you’re looking for.

The way that shows up will look different from one manager to another, but there are a few patterns that come up again and again...

1. They do too much themselves

The first is doing too much yourself. It makes sense when you think about it. If you’ve spent your career being the person who gets things done, handing work to someone else can feel slower, riskier and frankly a little painful. So you keep doing it. You become the bottleneck without meaning to and what looks from the outside like diligence can actually be a manager who hasn’t yet learned how to get things done through other people.

2. They avoid difficult conversations

The second is avoiding the conversation you know you need to have. It might be the underperformance you’ve been hoping will sort itself out, the behaviour that’s irritating everyone but hasn’t quite crossed the line, or the team member who clearly needs some honest feedback but somehow never quite becomes the right conversation at the right time. Tomorrow is remarkably good at never arriving.

3. They manage the work and forget about the people

And the third is managing the work rather than the people doing the work. This one is particularly understandable because tasks are familiar and people are not. You know how to review a pipeline, check a project, look at a number or solve a problem. But how do you build confidence in someone? How do you challenge them without knocking them? How do you know when to step in and when to step back? How do you have a conversation that someone might not want to hear, but absolutely needs to hear?

Those are skills and skills can be learned.

Why accidental managers struggle

The most important thing I’d say to an accidental manager is this: if you recognise yourself in any of this, you're not broken.

It doesn’t mean you’re not capable of managing well. It may simply mean you’ve stepped into a role that asks for skills you haven’t had the chance to develop yet. You haven’t necessarily been promoted beyond your capability. You may simply have been given a job that requires a different set of muscles, without anyone showing you how to build them. That’s very different.

I’ve worked with enough managers to know that most of them care deeply about doing a good job. They want their team to succeed, they want to be respected, they want to make good decisions and they want to develop people. They just don’t always know what good looks like when the situation is happening in front of them. Management rarely arrives as a neat problem with an obvious answer. It shows up in the person whose performance has dipped, the team member who needs more from you than you know how to give, the conversation you’ve been putting off or the decision where you’re unsure how much to step in.

And that is where the right management support matters. Not another course three months before the promotion and not a day away from the business where everyone talks about leadership strategy before going back to doing things exactly as they did before. What managers need is support when the actual thing is happening: the difficult conversation, the delegation decision, the person who isn’t performing, the brilliant employee who has started to disengage, or the moment when the manager themselves is starting to look a little overwhelmed. Those are the moments in which management gets learned.

The impact of accidental managers on their teams

Being managed by someone who is still figuring it out can be hard too.

You can end up waiting for decisions that should have been made, getting pulled into work your manager should probably have delegated, receiving different priorities depending on what has landed that morning, or not getting the feedback you need because your manager is avoiding the conversation. Perhaps most frustratingly, your own development falls off the to-do list because your manager is spending all their energy trying to keep their own head above water.

None of this necessarily comes from a bad place and that’s what makes it so difficult. Your manager may care enormously about you. They may simply not yet know how to manage you well. The longer that goes on, though, the more expensive it becomes for everyone. People disengage, good people leave, decisions slow down, managers become bottlenecks and conflict becomes more expensive.

The business starts paying for problems that often began much earlier, with someone struggling in a role they were never properly prepared for. For the people being managed, that experience can shape how supported they feel, how clearly they understand what is expected of them and whether they can see themselves progressing. Small gaps in management capability have a habit of becoming much more visible when they are experienced across an entire team.

The business cost of poor management

Management capability shapes performance far beyond the manager themselves. Good management improves productivity, retention, engagement and the development of the people underneath it, while poor management does the opposite.

That is why I think management capability belongs much closer to the commercial conversation than it usually sits. Not because managers are a risk to be controlled, but because good management is an asset to be developed.

This is where some of the conversations about management have become slightly unhelpful. We are very good at measuring what happens when things have already gone wrong. We look at attrition, engagement scores, absence, performance and complaints, but by the time those numbers move, the manager may have been struggling for months. That makes management capability useful as an earlier signal. The manager holding onto too much work, repeatedly postponing difficult conversations or struggling to develop the people around them is already telling us something, long before it becomes visible in an engagement survey or resignation letter.

The more useful question is whether we can recognise the signs earlier. Can we see that someone is holding onto too much work? Can we spot that difficult conversations are being avoided? Can we tell when a manager is still operating as the best individual contributor in the team rather than becoming the person who makes the team better? And, perhaps most importantly, can we give them somewhere to go when they recognise it themselves?

What accidental managers need to succeed

I’ve become increasingly convinced that managers don’t need more information or more theory. They need something to help them make sense of what is happening as it plays out in front of them. A salesperson has a CRM. A finance team has models and dashboards. A developer has tools built around the work they carry out. Managers are given a team, a title and a training course they attended six months ago and then expected to work out the rest as they go.

Managers need something equivalent for the people side of their job. Somewhere to make sense of a situation, understand where they may be getting stuck and think through what a good next step looks like. Because the hardest management decisions are rarely made in a training room. They happen in the middle of a working day, with a real person, real consequences and usually several competing priorities to consider.

I think there is a better way.

The three capabilities every manager needs to develop

For me, there are three parts to the job of being an effective people manager: Domain, Delivery and Development.

Domain

Domain is about whether I understand the work well enough to lead it credibly. Most accidental managers arrive with plenty of this. It is often exactly what earned them the promotion. They know the work, understand what good looks like and have a track record of delivering it.

That knowledge still matters. The challenge is learning how to use it without becoming the person who has to solve every problem themselves.

Delivery

Delivery is about whether I’m getting the work done through my team rather than doing it for them. That means setting clear expectations, delegating properly, creating accountability, making decisions and helping people move through the things that get in their way.

For someone who has built their reputation on being the person who gets things done, this can take some adjustment. Your own output is no longer the only measure of success. The performance of the people around you becomes part of it too.

Development

Development is about whether I’m making the people around me better, more capable and more confident. It happens through feedback, coaching, challenge, encouragement and the conversations that help someone understand where they are doing well and where they need to grow.

It also requires judgement. Knowing when somebody needs direction, when they need space, when to challenge and when to listen. This is often the part of management people have had the least opportunity to practise before they are expected to do it.

As I mention above, most accidental managers are already strong on domain. That’s why they got the job in the first place. The interesting bit is what happens next. Can they learn to deliver through other people? Can they learn to develop people rather than simply manage output? Can they recognise when something isn’t working before it becomes a bigger problem? Can they learn to ask for help before they need rescuing?

Those are capabilities and much like skills, capability can be developed.

How organisations can support accidental managers

If we know managers are learning while doing the job, then the way we support them needs to reflect that. Training has a role to play, particularly when someone first moves into management. But much of the learning happens later, when the theory meets a real situation.

It happens when someone needs to give difficult feedback and doesn’t know how to start the conversation. When a team member’s performance changes and they’re unsure why. When delegation keeps slipping back into doing everything themselves. When they know something isn’t working but can’t quite see what they need to change.

Those moments are where managers need somewhere to think. That means helping them recognise their own patterns, understand the situation in front of them and build the judgement to handle it well. Over time, the aim is for those skills to become part of how they manage, embedded behaviours that they draw on instinctively when the situation calls for them. It also means making it normal to ask for help before a situation becomes a problem. Managers should be able to say, “I’m not sure how to handle this,” without feeling that they have somehow failed the test of being a manager.

Give managers the tools they were never handed

This is the part I care about most. I don’t want this conversation to become another piece of management commentary that tells businesses how badly they’re doing and I certainly don’t want accidental managers reading it and thinking they’ve been found out. Quite the opposite. I think there is something incredibly hopeful about this problem.

If the issue is that millions of people were given responsibility without being properly equipped for it, then the answer isn’t particularly complicated. We equip them. We give them a way to understand what good management looks like, help them notice the things they’re struggling with before those things become patterns, and give them somewhere to turn when the difficult situation arrives. And perhaps most importantly, we make it completely normal to still be learning. I’ve been an accidental manager. I’ve been managed by one. I’ve got things right and I’ve got things spectacularly wrong. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from being on both sides of it, it’s that good managers aren’t born.

Sometimes the person who looks like they’re struggling the most is simply the person who has never been given the right tools yet. And that feels like a much more useful place to start.

That is the thinking behind Vokser.

Vokser gives managers personalised support around the real situations they face at work, helping them understand what is happening, work out what to do next and build their capability through experience.

Because most accidental managers already care about doing the job well. They just need the tools to help them get better at it.