What New Managers Actually Need (And Rarely Get)
Most first-time manager training doesn't work. Not because it's badly intentioned, but because it's built for a world that doesn't exist.
You know the setup: fly everyone to an offsite, pack five days with frameworks and models, then send them back to an inbox that's exploded while they were gone. Or worse, assign a generic e-learning course that treats managing a warehouse team the same as managing a product team.
The result? Managers who can recite theory but freeze when someone cries in a one-on-one. Or when two team members openly despise each other. Or when the "clear goals" from leadership are anything but.
The real problems
In-person training sounds ideal until you remember that people have jobs. Commuting to a conference room for a week while work piles up creates more stress than it solves. And the hybrid reality most companies live in now makes scheduling even messier.
Then there's the content itself. Most programs teach management as if organizations are rational, politics don't exist, and processes work as designed. They aren't. They do. And they don't.
New managers don't need another framework. They need to know what to do when the framework breaks.
The other common mistake: focusing on goals instead of process. "You need to hit these numbers" is unhelpful when someone doesn't know how to run a useful team meeting or give feedback that doesn't make people defensive. Goals without process creates overwhelm. Overwhelm creates paralysis.
What actually helps
Start fast. Days after someone gets the role, not weeks. The problems are already happening.
Keep it lean. Strip out everything that's nice-to-know and focus on must-know-right-now. You can always add more later.
Make it modular. Different people need different things depending on their team, their company, and what's already on fire.
Small groups work best—three to five people. Bigger than that and you lose intensity. Smaller and you lose the value of hearing how others handle the same problems.
Use real scenarios, not abstract case studies from business schools. Role-plays feel awkward, but they work. Someone pretending to be a difficult employee for ten minutes teaches more than reading about difficult employees for an hour.
Two two-hour sessions per week is a reasonable pace. Less than that and momentum dies. More and you're back to drinking from the firehose.
Pick trainers who've actually managed people in contexts that resemble yours. Teaching skill matters, but so does having scars from the same battles your new managers are about to fight.
One-on-one coaching isn't optional
Group training covers the common ground. But every new manager has specific situations that don't fit neatly into a curriculum. A direct report with personal problems affecting their work. A peer who keeps undermining them. A boss who's never available.
Personal coaching sessions—even just a few—give people a place to work through the messy stuff that's too specific or too sensitive for a group.
Mentors and peer buddies help too. Someone who's been through it recently. Someone who'll answer the stupid questions without judgment.
The uncomfortable truth
No training program, however well-designed, will fully prepare someone for management. The job is learned mostly by doing it badly for a while and then doing it less badly.
But good training shortens that painful period. It gives people language for what they're experiencing. It normalizes the difficulty. It offers tools that actually work when things get weird.
That's worth investing in. Especially since the alternative—throwing people into management with no support—costs far more in turnover, team dysfunction, and burned-out leaders who never wanted the job in the first place.
