I was recently talking with an operations manager about leadership development. Inevitably the conversation moved to “what’s the biggest problem you’re facing with your managers?” Their response was, “We promoted this person because they were a high performer. Now we’re six months in and we have HR issues with them. Their team isn’t performing and I’m questioning if I made the right decision to promote them.” This isn’t the first time I’ve had this conversation. As we dig into the details, I often find that the company had good intentions when promoting the person, but either didn’t clearly define what the role requires or lacked a consistent development program to set the new manager up for success.

According to Gallup’s “State of the Global Workplace 2025” report, “Less than half of the world’s managers (44%) say they have received management training.”

First-time managers are the only leaders most employees experience directly. They set expectations, communicate change, hold performance conversations, build development plans, manage budgets and oversee the employee lifecycle. Yet only 44% say they received management training. This presents a risk for organizations that depend on these managers to help the business succeed. L&D professionals are uniquely positioned to equip managers with the skills they need to meet those business objectives. This could include a formal leadership development program, mentoring, on-the-job observation or a combination of approaches.

I’ve been having these very conversations about the risks of not developing managers, as well as the benefits of equipping them with the skills they need to lead effectively and meet performance goals. L&D is an important piece of these strategic conversations, helping organizations address the common problem of promoting high performers into management roles before they are ready to lead.

3 Best Practices for Designing Effective First-Time Manager Programs

As I’ve designed these programs — often after an organization has asked why its new managers are failing — I’ve found three practices that hold true regardless of industry or size:

1.  Consider Diverse Insights

Considering diverse voices from people with firsthand experience from the beginning helps build a framework that better equips first-time managers for their roles. For instance:

• Human resources (HR) brings visibility into job descriptions and organizational structure, along with insight into who may be best positioned to step into a manager role.
• An experienced senior leader can help validate whether the competencies you identify reflect the realities of a manager’s first year in the role.
• A first-time manager in their position for less than a year can tell you what they wish they had known before stepping into the position, while the experience is still fresh.
• Peers and cross-functional partners who regularly work with first-time managers but don’t report to them can offer a valuable perspective. Their interactions with managers involve different expectations and challenges, and without their input, a competency model may overlook important skills managers need from day one.
• An executive sponsor is a crucial advocate for the L&D investment, communicating the program’s expected outcomes and reinforcing its value across the organization. Without that support, even a well-designed program can struggle to gain traction.

With the right stakeholders in place, ask open-ended questions, such as:

• What problem are we solving?
• What skills does a first-time manager need?
• How do these skills connect to organizational objectives?
• How do we prioritize them?
• How do we measure success?
• What are we missing?

The list of solutions will grow quickly, so ruthlessly prioritizing them will help build your minimum viable version.

2.  Identify the Right Skills and Competencies

With the right people engaged, we’re moving from the overarching objective to the detailed skills and capabilities this group needs to be successful.

Consider:

• What are the primary competencies this role needs?
• How do we define them?
• What do the behaviors look like when someone is doing them well?
• What type of training will achieve this (e.g., on the job, social or formal training)?

Because first-time managers are in a unique position to influence the employee experience across the organization, we want to ensure the competency model includes both technical and people-focused skills.

Focus your program design on the what, the why and the how: what managers need to do, why those responsibilities matter and how they can effectively carry them out. When we skip this step, it creates risk down the road. If your managers are solely focusing on the what, the how and why can resurface later as employee relations issues, compliance gaps or the loss of both customers and employees, all traceable back to managers who were never equipped to lead. The operations manager I opened this article with was already living this: Her promoted manager’s team started missing performance goals and had gone to HR because the manager wasn’t having one-on-ones with them. That was the risk of not training the manager upfront.

Lastly, decide upfront whether you’re designing at the organizational level or the role level; that choice determines whether the model scales with you. A first-time manager leading a call center team and one leading a finance team face different daily pressures, even when the underlying competency is the same.

3.   Design the Program, Then Iterate

A few years ago, I built a leadership training program for an organization’s core leaders, most with five or more years of experience in the role. For them, the goal was to create common language around how you lead, specifically within this organization. That program worked well for director-level leaders and above. But it raised an obvious question: What about the first-time managers?

We took the original content, a new group of stakeholders and built a program for that specific audience. Some of the content from core program was transferable at scale, but we knew there would be different skills this audience needed.

We built the competency framework, then went back to our stakeholders and asked what’s missing. Their answer: reading and managing a budget, and project management, neither of which was addressed in the program. At first, I was frustrated that we missed this in our discovery process. However, this was part of the iteration. It’s why we test and pilot before we roll out a solution organization wide.

My point here is that we’re not going to get it perfect the first time. That’s why it’s important to bring in diverse perspectives and build in opportunities for feedback, ensuring the program stays focused on the end goal. This is also why a pilot or test group is so valuable. I wouldn’t have realized we were missing this content if we hadn’t taken the first step and then asked for feedback.

Final Thoughts

As an L&D professional, if you haven’t addressed the risk of not developing your first-time managers, here’s my challenge to you: Have the conversation, even if it’s solely to validate your current state. You need one meeting; you’ll know within an hour where you are, what might need to be developed and the potential for a business case to launch a project.

That’s where first-time manager development starts. We are in the business of helping the organization meet their business objectives. The risk of the largest population of managers not being trained puts us at the center of closing a major skills gap.

Seek out diverse perspectives, continuously reevaluate your efforts and test your approach before scaling it across the organization. That’s how we build stronger programs that set first-time managers up for success.