Promoting High Performers to Managers Without Adequate Training is Costing UK Businesses £7bn Every Year

Poor productivity cost the global economy £322 billion last year. The UK economy’s share of this loss is around £7 billion and according to Gallup’s State of the Global Workforce 2025 Report, this is mostly due to lower manager engagement. The report also highlights that only three in ten workers have the natural characteristics to manage people productively and they only become effective leaders when their business invests in them and gives them the right training. 

What happens when great technical experts become leaders without support?

Technical experts are often promoted to become managers, and in many organisations that’s the only way to recognise and reward their high performance. But experts often lack soft skills and recent findings reveal that 82%^[1] of new managers have received no training to help them in their new role.

A poor people manager can easily demotivate and disengage their team which can result in high performers leaving, a fall in team performance, and possibly the manager leaving themselves, taking valuable skills and experience with them. The wider organisation suffers a financial loss and must recruit and upskill a new leader as well as losing a talented individual.

70% of team engagement is inspired by managers so organisations should actively take steps to support newly promoted managers. Training and development turn experts into leaders, equipping these new managers with the tools and skills needed to confidently manage people in their team and improve performance.

“A highly talented technical expert, having invested years of study in their chosen field, is given a managerial role as a reward. With little training, support or even interest in leadership, they become overwhelmed and stressed.”

What makes a good Leader?

High-performing leaders can be up to 800% more productive than the average performers in the same role, says McKinsey. As management becomes more complex, the skills needed are rarely built into a newly promoted expert, so achieving this level of performance needs investment.

Harvard Business Review (HBR)^[2] research highlights the three most important leadership capabilities have become: 

• Communicating organisational purpose to employees
• Emotional and social intelligence
• Conflict management. 

These skills enable managers to motivate, empower, and lead – but these attributes may not come naturally to many new people managers. HBR also identify three other important skills for effective managers:

• Soft skills like managing polarisation, stress and burnout in the workplace
• Providing direction in rapidly evolving and uncertain situations
• Managing change and risk. 

Softer emotional and social intelligence capabilities, leadership and core management skills enable newly promoted experts to create the safe spaces that build trust, lead to innovation and unleash their team’s success.

Few if any employees come with these skills ready installed, much less those from a technical background. By providing appropriate training as part of a promotion and ongoing support once within a new role, can give new people leaders the confidence to be a competent leader.

How to turn experts into leaders

Supporting a highly accomplished professional to transition into management is a different challenge to supporting first-time managers. Experts are often already respected in their organisation and may be mentoring and supporting many technical colleagues already.

When experts become managers, the focus shifts from technical ability to leadership capability. This can be hard to do without support. Few experts turned leaders can easily move from no longer providing solutions and refocusing away from technical challenges to using soft skills to solve problems.

A first step in leadership is becoming responsible for a team and not just themselves. This means newly promoted managers must learn a whole different set of people management skills so they can engage their new team effectively.

As well as feeling confident to engage with their team in a new way, the expert turned leader’s focus will be on how to empower and motivate, and to talk through their individual team member’s issues, ensuring they get the best out of each individual as well as the collective team performance.

How organisations can support experts to become effective leaders

Business and HR leaders targeting performance growth by building an effective management infrastructure can turn expert technicians into effective managers by focusing on these areas:

• Manager selection processes need structure and rigour to identify those with enough basic management characteristics, the soft skills and the right attitude who can be developed. 
• Transitioning from self-management to team management, introducing the expert about to become new leader to behaviours that shift their mindset away from a solutions-based role to using soft skills to support their team.
• Empowering to perform, introducing a new approach, transitioning from the expert telling and advising to the coach asking and listening.
• Leading holistically by communicating purpose, navigating change, creating the culture and safe space to promote creativity and risk taking.

LHH’s Expert to Leader programme equips newly promoted experts with the tools and skills needed to manage their new team effectively and confidently. Through workshops and coaching sessions, experts successfully transition into their new manager role by understanding and harnessing the key requirements for leadership success.

References

^[1] Better Management Report, published by CMI and YouGov, 2023

^[2] Harvard Business Publishing Corporate Learning Survey, July-August 2022