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Anyone who’s made the transition from individual contributor to first-time manager will tell you: This change is exciting, but it’s not always easy to navigate.
And it’s an area where a surprising majority of companies fall short: According to Gallup, less than half of the world’s managers (44%) say they’ve received management training.
Newly minted managers who land in their roles without formal training are sometimes referred to as “accidental managers,” and the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) finds that about 82% of managers fit this description.
This gap comes at a time when managers’ responsibilities are growing. Stephanie Neal, director of DDI’s Center for Analytics and Behavioral Research puts this problem in context: “While expectations of front-line leaders are rising, they aren't getting the coaching, training and support they need to be successful.”
How do you avoid the accidental manager issue and develop the right management skills for new managers? We’ll take an in-depth look at what’s involved in training a new manager and share experts’ insights throughout this article.
What are the essential management skills for new managers?
If you’re serious about developing management skills in your new managers, you’ll want to consider which skills are critical. Here’s an overview of essential management skills.
Coaching
What is coaching? Coaching refers to a specific approach to managing and inspiring team members. Instead of telling them what to do, coaching involves using skills like active listening and asking powerful questions to help direct reports arrive at their own answers.
Why is coaching an essential management skill? There’s a strong connection between coaching and employee engagement and retention. Companies with strong coaching cultures are 2.9 times more likely to engage and retain top talent. Coaching for managers also leads to positive outcomes like improvements in work outcomes and increased self-confidence.
"In my work advising thousands of executives and senior leaders, I've found coaching is one of the least-understood leadership skills. Leaders mistakenly think they'll save time by telling their teams what to do rather than guiding them to their own conclusions. The reality? This top-down, prescriptive approach to coaching has detrimental business impacts, disempowering employees and eroding trust," said Matt Paese, Ph.D., SVP of Leadership Insights at DDI.
The scaling challenge: Studies show that the process of developing coaches involves building a set of competencies, mindsets, and identities associated with effective managerial coaching behaviors. In other words, managers learn to be better coaches through an ongoing process rather than a one-off event.
Here’s how Kate Booth, Head of Learning and Development at MinterEllison, describes her company’s approach to developing coaching skills: “We identified an opportunity to enhance our senior employees’ coaching skills... by employing inquiry-based techniques, our senior people help colleagues discover solutions, fostering critical thinking. This is how we cultivate adaptability and agility."
Conflict resolution
What is conflict resolution? Conflict resolution is the ability to defuse tense situations and help team members deal with strong emotions in a productive manner. Managers who are skilled in conflict resolution also learn to identify misunderstandings that have the potential to lead to conflict and address them before they even become issues.
Why is conflict resolution an essential management skill? DDI finds that nearly half—49% of manager candidates—lack effective conflict management skills and only 12% demonstrate high proficiency in handling conflict at work. These numbers hint at many larger issues: “Conflict can have a ripple effect throughout organizations, stifling productivity, creativity and morale—and ultimately driving higher turnover. Now is the time for leaders to address the conflict management gap,” writes Stephanie Neal, director of DDI’s Center for Analytics and Behavioral Research.
The scaling challenge: Like many essential management skills, becoming adept at conflict resolution involves more than learning how it works in theory. One study found an effective approach incorporates three distinct phases: learning, practice, and reflection. “The three most frequently used strategies for managing conflict were identifying the root cause of the problem, actively listening, and being specific and objective in explaining their concerns,” write the study’s authors Sakhi Aggrawal and Alejandra J. Magana.
Strategic direction
What is strategic direction? Strategic direction refers to a manager’s ability to analyze a company’s current problems and opportunities and place them in context for their team, taking high-level strategy and translating it into the everyday tasks their team members are working on.
Why is strategic direction an essential management skill? With all the change and unpredictability in the world, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and lose focus. And it’s not just individual contributors who feel this way—HR Dive reported that “setting strategy” and “managing change” were the two areas where leaders said they had the biggest skill gaps.
Here’s how Jessie Knight, Vice President in the Gartner HR practice, described the issue: “Organizations are seeking to reset their strategies to reflect emerging conditions, but most feel unprepared to execute.”
The scaling challenge: Ed Barrows, a Brown University professor, outlines the essential steps involved in developing strategic direction. He writes, “You have to consider both what's happening today as well as what may happen in the future, and then think holistically about how you fit those two things together.” Barrows argues that leaders need to set aside a time and place for reflection in order to build the habit. In other words, setting strategic direction is most effective when it becomes part of a leader’s established routine.
Feedback
What is feedback? Giving feedback is the process of informing employees about their strengths and areas for improvement in clear and constructive ways. It shouldn’t just be limited to annual performance management cycles—the best managers find ways to provide feedback through frequent, ongoing conversations.
Why is feedback an essential management skill? There appears to be a strong connection between feedback and employee engagement: Gallup reports that 80% of employees who say they have received meaningful feedback in the past week are fully engaged. According to Gallup, feedback is most effective when it shows recognition or appreciation for recent work, occurs in short, frequent conversations, and stays focused on priorities and strengths.
The scaling challenge: There’s a theoretical component to developing feedback skills that involves becoming familiar with specific feedback frameworks, but it’s also important for managers to practice delivering feedback. This is why improving feedback skills is an area where peer learning can be particularly effective. According to Gallup: “Managers can get valuable insights and see what ownership looks like when other managers describe their challenges, ideas and successes.”
Emotional intelligence (EI)
What is emotional intelligence (EI)? Emotional intelligence or EI involves identifying and managing your own emotions and understanding the influence of emotions on others.
Why is emotional intelligence an essential management skill? “Emotionally intelligent leaders are better equipped to sustain employee engagement, manage stress, and foster a shared sense of purpose despite external challenges,” write Madonna Salameh-Ayanian, Natalie Tamer, and Nada Jabbour Al Maalouf, the authors of “The Importance of Emotional Intelligence in Managers and Its Impact on Employee Performance Amid Turbulent Times.” They point out several common situations—such as economic recessions, shrinking growth, and organizational uncertainty—where emotional intelligence is particularly valuable.
The scaling challenge: According to the study mentioned above, the most impactful aspects of emotional intelligence are self-regulation and empathy, skills that are best developed through peer mentoring, emotional self-assessments, and empathy-based training.
Delegation
What is delegation? Delegation is the practice of assigning meaningful tasks and decision-making authority to your team members. It’s about more than managing your own workload. When delegation is done well, it develops your team's capabilities and creates space for you to focus on higher-priority strategic work.
Why is delegation an essential management skill? New managers who have recently been promoted from high-performing individual contributor roles are often tempted to keep doing the work themselves. “Emerging leaders are struggling to transition from being 'doers' to 'delegators,'” said Tacy M. Byham, Ph.D., CEO of DDI. But this can quickly lead to burnout. DDI finds that delegation is five times more impactful than any other burnout mitigation skill.
The scaling challenge: Learning to delegate involves changing your mindset. You have to stop thinking that you’re the only one who can do the work or meet certain standards. As Shanna Hocking writes in Harvard Business Review, “This shift, from ‘doing’ to ‘managing’ can feel uncomfortable—especially if you’re used to getting recognition for carrying out tasks quickly and well. The reality is, your job has changed now, and how your performance is measured will change along with it.” This also involves building in regular opportunities to check in with your team members, give feedback, and reflect on what you might do differently in the future.
Management skills examples: What are they and how are they learned?
Why traditional training for new managers falls short
The typical approach to training for new managers involved offering one-off workshops and courses to address specific needs. But this approach isn’t aligned with how we actually learn and retain information.
The Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve describes how our brains lose information over time when we don’t attempt to retain it. Basically, it’s proof that one-off manager training curriculum modules aren’t enough to change behavior.
The 70/20/10 model reinforces this, asserting that we gain 70% of our knowledge from job-related experiences, 20% from interactions with others, and 10% from formal educational events.
Josh Bersin, a thought leader in the HR space, frames this challenge succinctly in a Chief Learning Officer article: “For many years, we've used the pedagogical model of teaching in corporate learning and development. This approach involved building courses, curricula and certifications, then forcing employees to wade through a course and complete it as validation of their learning... that model just doesn't work anymore. Learners need far more support to truly absorb and retain knowledge. There's fascinating research on this, like the well-known forgetting curve and the importance of spaced repetition, showing how quickly we forget what we try to learn without ongoing reinforcement.”
There’s good news and bad news here for L&D professionals: On the one hand, traditional approaches to developing skills are no longer sufficient in today’s workplace (that’s the bad news). But that also relieves you of the burden of creating endless one-off training sessions or courses for your employees and having to manually track employees’ progress (that’s the good news).
Next, we’ll look at how to adapt your manager training to meet these new demands.
Looking for step-by-step guidance on how to transform emerging talent into high-performing leaders? Download the Leadership Development Mentorship Programs guide.
The shift from developing management skills to building systems
Teaching a manager about conflict resolution or emotional intelligence in a workshop might be part of your program for developing management skills, but it can’t end there. It’s much more effective to shift from developing skills (which is a manual, input-based approach) to a more holistic manager enablement program that focuses on outcomes.
How do you achieve this? The outcome-based enablement approach starts with competency frameworks that define ideal behaviors. Instead of simply tracking whether a manager has participated in a training module, you’re defining success based on the changes in their behavior. And rather than putting all the burden on the L&D team to meet managers’ needs, you’re relying on mentoring and peer learning to create accountability.
Input-based training vs. outcome-based enablement
What scalable management development requires
We’ve looked at why it makes sense to shift to an outcomes-focused systematic approach to management development. Now let’s explore the building blocks you’ll need in order to set it up.
Scalable leadership development depends on four things working together:
- Ongoing peer learning ensures managers aren't developing in isolation.
- Embedded coaching and mentorship bring managerial competencies to life through real relationships rather than classroom theory.
- Competency-based tracking replaces completion metrics with behavioral evidence, making management development measurable rather than assumed.
- Automation and reporting make it all visible at scale—surfacing gaps, flagging progress, and connecting people development to the outcomes organizations actually care about.
How to move from manager training to manager enablement
Now it’s time to consider how you’ll make the transition from a typical “manager training” mindset to the “manager enablement” approach we’ve been exploring. Here are a few steps to guide you.
1. Define competencies
Start with a shared definition of what "good" looks like. Competency frameworks translate your broad development goals—things like emotional intelligence, conflict resolution, or setting strategic direction—into specific, measurable behaviors that can be assessed, coached toward, and tracked over time.
2. Build reinforcement systems (mentoring, peer cohorts)
Once you’ve defined the key competencies, you can build the infrastructure that keeps development alive between formal learning events. Mentoring pairs new managers with more experienced leaders who can guide them toward applying skills and peer cohorts create shared accountability and a space to work through challenges together. Without these reinforcement systems, even well-designed training programs are vulnerable to the forgetting curve.
3. Implement structured programs
Structured programs like workshops, cohort learning, and scenario-based training provide the conceptual scaffolding that experiential and social learning then activate and refine. When built on a clear competency framework and surrounded by reinforcement systems, formal training stops being a one-off event and becomes the entry point into a sustained development journey.
4. Measure competency growth
Competency-based tracking shifts the success metric from completion (e.g. measuring how many managers attended a session) to progression (whether managers are demonstrating target behaviors more consistently over time). Regular 360-degree assessments, manager observations, and performance data close the loop, connecting development investment to real business outcomes.
Making management skills a competitive advantage
You know what good management development looks like, but how do you deliver it at scale? It all relies on having the right operational foundation. If you’re still designing competency frameworks, building mentoring programs, and tracking behavioral progress manually, it’s hard to move out of the administrative mindset.
Mentoring software like Together can transform your approach by acting as the operating system that connects every layer of your enablement infrastructure. We automate mentor matching, build program milestones and check-ins into the platform, and generate reports that give your team up-to-the-minute insights into participation, engagement, and progress.
What was once a patchwork of spreadsheets, calendar invites, and informal relationships becomes a structured, measurable, and scalable system. With Together’s support, you can ensure that every new manager gets the same quality of development and you put the days of “accidental managers” behind you.
Want to bring these ideas to life for your organization? Book a demo to explore how Together can help you think beyond management skills and start building a sustainable manager enablement program.
Frequently asked questions (FAQs)
How long does it take to develop management skills?
There's no universal timeline—it depends on the individual, the skill in question, and the quality of the development infrastructure around them. But we know that meaningful behavior change requires sustained reinforcement over weeks and months. A new manager working within a structured enablement program that includes mentoring, peer learning, and regular feedback typically develops core competencies faster than one who’s left to figure things out on their own. The more important question for L&D leaders isn't "How long will this take?" but "Do we have the systems in place to support continuous development?"
What's the biggest mistake new managers make?
One of the most common mistakes new managers make is continuing to operate the same way they did when they were individual contributors. They stay focused on doing the work themselves rather than developing their team's ability to do it. This is particularly common among high performers who were promoted based on their technical skills. The transition to management requires a fundamentally different mindset: Success is no longer about your own output, but about the collective output of the people you lead. Coaching, delegation, and feedback skills are all critical to making this shift, which is why they're among the hardest competencies to develop through a one-off workshop alone.
How do you measure whether a new manager is developing effectively?
Completion metrics—like whether a manager attended a training session or finished a course—don’t actually help you measure development. You can get a better sense of managers’ behavior change through 360-degree feedback, observations from their managers, and performance data over time. Are they having more effective 1:1s? Is their team's engagement improving? Are they resolving conflict before it escalates? Competency frameworks are useful here because they translate broad development goals into specific, observable behaviors that you can assess consistently across your manager population.
What's the role of mentorship in new manager development?
Mentorship gives new managers something that workshops and courses can't: a trusted relationship with someone who has navigated the same challenges and can offer real-time guidance. When a new manager is struggling with a difficult conversation, a feedback situation, or a question of strategy, a mentor provides context-specific support that no training module can replicate. Building formal mentoring into your manager development program ensures that every new manager has access to this kind of support, not just those who happen to know the right people.