Many SMEs promote their strongest technical experts as the team grows. The logic seems flawless: they understand the work, have earned senior leadership's trust and solve problems quickly. Yet the very qualities that justified the promotion can become the main obstacle to performing the new role.
The new manager is still the person who knows the most and solves fastest. Under pressure, they return to doing the work, correct the team directly or escalate every decision to the CEO. It looks efficient in the short term. Over time it creates dependence, reduces team learning and keeps senior leadership inside operations.
The problem is not that the manager lacks potential. The company has changed their responsibility without redesigning what doing the job well now means.
The essential shift: from producing answers to building capability
Linda A. Hill, a professor at Harvard Business School, has studied the transition into a first management role for decades. In ‘Becoming the Boss’, she explains that new managers discover that managing is not about formal authority or achieving results individually, but about building the conditions for a team to produce results. Harvard Business Review.
This distinction matters commercially. If a manager remains the best executor, the company has added a hierarchical layer but has not created management capacity. Five shifts show whether the transition is actually happening:
Why it matters more than it seems
Gallup estimates that managers account for around 70% of the variation in team engagement. This does not mean every engagement issue is solely the manager's responsibility, but it does show that their behaviour has a disproportionate effect on the daily experience of work. Gallup.
In an SME, that influence is amplified. A manager is usually close to both the CEO and operations. They translate priorities, allocate resources, decide which problems escalate and determine whether an error becomes learning or concealment.
Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety found an association, in a sample of 51 teams, between perceived interpersonal safety and learning behaviours. It does not imply that ‘feeling good’ guarantees performance. It means something more precise: when admitting an error, asking for help or questioning a decision carries a high interpersonal cost, the team has less information available for learning. DOI.
Why an isolated course often falls short
Leadership training can work. A meta-analysis published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, integrating 335 independent samples, found positive effects from leadership-development interventions. But design matters: needs analysis, practice, feedback and distributing sessions over time are among the decisions that shape transfer. PubMed.
The practical conclusion is not ‘more training hours’. It is to design an environment where learning a behaviour, applying it, receiving feedback and trying again are part of the same process.
A minimum system for developing managers
1. Define the role in observable terms
‘Lead well’ does not guide behaviour. It is more useful to agree what must happen: one-to-one meetings at a defined frequency, clear goals, delegation with decision latitude, specific feedback and early treatment of performance problems.
2. Choose two or three behaviours
Trying to improve delegation, communication, motivation, conflict, strategy and time management at once turns development into an impossible list. The baseline should identify which two or three changes would release the most team capacity.
3. Practise with real work
The manager should prepare a delegation they are about to make, rehearse a pending conversation or redesign an existing meeting. Transfer no longer depends on remembering concepts weeks later.
4. Involve the manager's manager
If the CEO continues rewarding managers for ‘handling it personally’, training competes with the real recognition system. The manager's manager must reinforce the new role by asking what has been delegated, what decision has been transferred and what capability is being built.
5. Measure before and after
No complex infrastructure is required. You can observe feedback frequency, unnecessary escalations, clarity of objectives, quality of one-to-one meetings or behavioural progress assessed by specific stakeholders.
What a company can do this month
Before purchasing a broad programme, run a simple test:
- Select three to five managers with real responsibility for people.
- Ask the CEO which decisions still reach their desk but should not.
- Ask teams which management conversation or practice is missing.
- Choose one shared behaviour and apply it for four weeks.
- Review evidence and obstacles before expanding the programme.
Starting now does not require launching a cultural transformation. It turns an abstract problem —‘our managers need to lead better’— into a testable hypothesis about real work.
Sources and further reading
- Hill, L. A. (2007). Becoming the Boss. Harvard Business Review.
- Lacerenza, C. N. et al. (2017). Leadership training design, delivery, and implementation: A meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology. DOI: 10.1037/apl0000241.
- Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams. Administrative Science Quarterly.
- Gallup (2015). Managers Account for 70% of Variance in Employee Engagement.
Editorial note: the sources support general principles; they do not guarantee specific results in any company. Impact depends on context, intervention design and senior-leadership participation.