Leadership development starts with the accidental manager

Most leadership development still misses the people who need it most. Research from the Chartered Management Institute suggests the large majority of managers step into the role with no formal training, a pattern known as the "accidental manager".

That gap is widening as the management skills organisations need shift faster than traditional training can keep pace with, and it shows up as disengagement, turnover and inconsistent leadership long before it shows up on a balance sheet.

One-off courses do not build the management skills the role demands. Coaching, delivered consistently rather than as a single event, is what builds the reflection and behaviour change leadership development actually requires.

Training to Lead

Most managers did not train to lead. They trained to do the job they were good at, and one day someone handed them a team. In most cases, what they got was a promotion, not leadership development.

That is not a criticism of the individuals involved. It is a fair description of how most organisations still fill management roles. The Chartered Management Institute has described this pattern as the "accidental manager".

Research it carried out with YouGov, surveying more than 4,500 workers and managers, found that 82% of people entering management positions had received no formal management or leadership training.

I see the consequences of this constantly in my coaching work. A talented salesperson becomes a sales manager and has no idea how to run a difficult conversation about underperformance.

A brilliant engineer is put in charge of a team. He defaults to doing the work himself rather than delegating it, because delegation was never part of his job before.

None of this is a failure of character. It is a failure of leadership development that never happened.

The accidental manager problem is a leadership development problem

The cost is not abstract. Teams led by undertrained managers disengage faster, turn over more often, and produce less. Managers are consistently identified as one of the biggest single influences on team engagement.

That makes an undertrained manager anything but a neutral hire. It is a compounding risk sitting in the middle of your organisation, and closing it is exactly what proper leadership development is for.

Most organisations already know this in principle. Where it breaks down is in practice. Leadership development gets treated as a course a manager attends once, rather than a capability the organisation builds deliberately over time.

Why the UK's skills gap makes this more urgent

This would be a manageable problem if the skills required to manage well were static. They are not. The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 places resilience, adaptability, empathy and leadership among the capabilities organisations will need most by 2030.

It also warns that a substantial share of today's workforce skills will be outdated within the decade.

The UK's own skills gap compounds this. Employers here are not just short of technical capability. They are short of the relational and behavioural skills that sit underneath good management, and those are not skills you can teach in a two-day course and expect to stick. They require reflection, feedback and repeated practice in real situations.

That is a fundamentally different kind of development to the induction training most new managers receive once and never revisit.

At the same time, the model of management itself is shifting. Directing and controlling a team was never a complete approach, and it is becoming actively counterproductive.

Effective people management now asks for genuine personal connection, sensible use of data to spot problems early, and a relentless focus on unlocking what people are actually capable of.

Asking an undertrained manager to deliver all three, with no support beyond a single onboarding session, is unrealistic.

One-off training does not build management skills

The instinct in most organisations is to respond to a skills gap with a course. It is an understandable instinct, and it is also why the accidental manager problem persists despite decades of investment in leadership training.

Courses are episodic. They happen once, and they are generic by design because they have to serve a room of different people with different challenges. They ask managers to absorb information rather than practise a behaviour under real conditions. None of that builds lasting management skills.

Behaviour change comes from reflection, feedback and repetition, applied to a manager's actual, current situation, not a hypothetical case study.

That is the case for coaching over training as the primary mechanism here. It is also the reason coaching has traditionally been reserved for senior leaders. It works, but it has been expensive and difficult to scale.

That difficulty falls hardest on exactly the group experiencing the accidental manager problem most acutely.

What real leadership development looks like

If the goal is genuinely to close the gap, rather than to be seen to have addressed it, leadership development has to be ongoing. It needs to be personalised to what a manager is facing that week, and available when they need it rather than scheduled months in advance. That is a different proposition to a training calendar.

That's why we built Bravyn the way we did: to make that kind of support possible for every manager, not just the ones a budget could historically stretch to.

The accidental manager is not a personal failing. It is a systemic one, and it is solvable. Organisations that treat leadership development as continuous, rather than a box to be ticked once, are best placed to keep up as the management skills their business needs keep changing.

If you think about the managers in your organisation right now, how many of them were trained to lead, and how many were simply promoted and left to work it out?