We promote our best people. Then we leave them to lead alone. This is one of the most familiar patterns in our industry. Someone is excellent at their work. They are trusted, capable, respected. So they are promoted. And from that day, they are expected to lead. The numbers on what happens next are sobering.
The Chartered Management Institute, working with YouGov, found that 82% of people moving into a management role in the UK do so with no formal management or leadership training. The CMI calls them accidental managers. Research from CEB, now part of Gartner, puts the failure rate for new managers at around 60% within their first two years.
Gartner found that where a new leader is struggling, their team performs around 15% worse on average and is 20% more likely to disengage or leave. More than a quarter of workers in the CMI study had left an organisation because of their relationship with a manager.
Read together, those figures describe something specific. We promote for technical excellence, then ask for something entirely different, and rarely prepare anyone for the change.
Promotion grants a title, not a skill set. Without deliberate development, a new leader falls back on the one thing they know works: doing the job themselves. They struggle to delegate, because doing it feels faster and safer. They cannot let go of the day-to-day, because that is where their confidence lives. Their team never develops real ownership, because the leader is still holding it.
That is not a people problem. It is a conditions problem, and two conditions sit at the centre of it: capability and autonomy. Build a leader’s capability and they can begin to let go. As they let go, their team’s autonomy grows. As the team takes ownership, the leader finally has room to lead.
None of this came as news to the people we work alongside. In conversations with partners across electrical wholesale, contracting and compliance, and social housing, leadership comes up more than any other subject, and in almost identical language every time. Good people promoted on merit, then left to work out the hardest part of the job alone. What the national research describes, our supply chain echoes.
The conclusion is not complicated. Leadership capability has to be built deliberately. It does not arrive with a job title, and it does not appear because someone was excellent at the work they were promoted out of. Organisations that develop their people end up with leaders. Those that promote and hope end up with the figures above.
That is what Aico Academy Beyond is for. It is our own learning and development function, opened up to the organisations we work alongside. Our Equipped to Lead programme came out of those supply chain conversations rather than from a catalogue, which is why it deals with this pattern rather than leadership in the abstract.
Whether that support comes from us or from somewhere else matters far less than whether it happens at all. The cost of leaving good people to work it out alone is already being paid. It is just being paid quietly, by the teams they lead.
If you are interested in how Aico Academy Beyond can help you and your business, get in touch via enquiries@aico.co.uk
