It happens in businesses everywhere. Someone is brilliant at their job. They know the customers, understand the systems, solve problems before anyone else has even noticed them and can be relied on to get things done. So naturally, we promote them.
Congratulations – you’re now a manager! Here’s a team of six people, several competing priorities, a couple of tricky personalities, performance conversations to navigate and someone asking about their career development. Off you go!
We see this all the time, people step into leadership because they’re great at what they do, but without necessarily having been prepared for the very different job of leading people. And that distinction matters.
Being technically capable and being capable of leading a team are two very different skill sets. The good news is that leadership can be learned, but businesses need to stop expecting managers to pick it up through osmosis!
Promotion Isn’t Preparation
When someone moves into management, their job fundamentally changes.
Success is no longer just about what they personally deliver. Suddenly, they’re responsible for creating the conditions in which other people can deliver too.
That means setting expectations, delegating, giving feedback, coaching, managing conflict, motivating different personalities and having conversations they’d occasionally rather avoid until approximately never.
Yet we regularly see managers given responsibility for all of this with very little practical training.
Our Leadership Capability Workshops are designed to bridge that gap. Rather than drowning managers in leadership theory, we focus on the real stuff, how to communicate well, build trust, manage performance, give feedback and understand the impact their leadership style has on others.
Because technically, “figure it out as you go” counts as a development strategy. It’s just not a particularly good one!
Managers Need to Grow Too
Managers spend a lot of time thinking about everyone else’s development. Who’s ready for more responsibility? Who needs some extra support? Who has potential? Who needs to build confidence or capability?
Meanwhile, their own development can quietly disappear off the radar.
Stepping into management shouldn’t mean you’ve somehow graduated from needing development yourself. In fact, it’s usually the opposite. You’ve taken on a whole new part of the job, leading people, and there’s plenty to learn.
That’s where having a clear development plan and pathway can make a real difference. It gives managers the chance to step back and think about the kind of leader they want to be, where they’re already strong, where they need to build capability and what support will actually help them get there.
For some, that might mean an Individual Development Plan with clear goals and actions. For others, it could be coaching, mentoring, targeted workshops, taking on a stretch project or simply getting more regular feedback from their own manager.
The important bit is that development is intentional. We shouldn’t expect managers to spend all their energy growing everyone around them while leaving their own leadership development to chance.
Current New Zealand workforce data gives us a useful reminder that development matters. MBIE’s 2025 hospitality and tourism workforce research found 70 percent of respondents wanted more training, even though access to training had improved considerably. That’s sector-specific, so we wouldn’t apply the figure to every NZ workplace, but it reinforces something we see with our clients all the time, people don’t stop wanting to learn just because they’re competent in their role.
Managers shouldn’t either.
Better Conversations
One of the biggest shifts from employee to manager is suddenly being responsible for conversations that matter.
Telling someone, “You’re doing brilliantly” is the easy part. Telling them, “Something isn’t working here” takes a little more skill.
That’s why good managers need more than an open-door policy and good intentions. They need practical frameworks for regular 1:1s, coaching conversations, feedback and performance discussions.
Structured 1:1s help managers move away from conversations that consist entirely of “How’s everything going?” followed by “Yep, good”. Instead, they create space to talk about priorities, roadblocks, workload, development and what support someone actually needs. They also make difficult conversations much easier, because feedback is already normal. Nothing has been silently brewing for six months before exploding into an annual review.
The Human Skills Matter
Technical skills might get someone promoted. Human skills determine how well they lead.
Communication, active listening, emotional intelligence, managing up, giving feedback, handling conflict, understanding different working styles. These are not “nice to haves” once you’re responsible for people. They’re the job.
Our In-House Soft Skills Workshops allow businesses to focus development on the areas their managers genuinely need, rather than sending everyone off to generic management training and hoping something sticks.
Think about the challenges your managers are facing right now. Are they struggling to delegate? Avoiding difficult conversations? Over-managing? Under-managing? Finding it hard to motivate their team? Start there. Training is far more useful when people can walk back into work the next morning and actually use it.
Keep the Learning Going
A two-hour workshop can spark a great idea. It cannot create a great leader by Thursday.
Leadership development works best when it continues beyond the training room. Managers need opportunities to practise, reflect, get feedback, try things differently and build confidence over time.
That’s why we’re big believers in continual learning and improvement. Leadership isn’t something you learn once, tick off the list and declare yourself fully cooked. It develops through experience, regular feedback, coaching and having the chance to stop and think about what’s working, and what could work better.
The goal isn’t perfection. In fact, if we’re waiting for perfect managers, we may be here a while!
The goal is to create leaders who are curious about their impact, willing to keep learning and comfortable asking, “What could I do better next time?”
That might mean regular coaching, peer learning, refresher workshops, development goals or simply making leadership development part of your everyday conversations, rather than something you dust off once a year.
The Squeezed Middle
There’s a reason middle management can feel particularly tough.
You’re translating strategy from above while managing reality below. You’re responsible for team performance but don’t always control the decisions affecting the team. You’re expected to support your people while still hitting your own deadlines. It’s called the squeezed middle for a reason!
So don’t just train managers and send them back into the wild. Give them access to coaching. Create opportunities for managers to learn from each other. Make expectations clear. Check in on how they’re coping, not just how their team is performing.
And make leadership development an ongoing pathway, rather than remedial training that only appears when something has gone wrong.
Managers Multiply Culture
For most employees, their manager is the person who turns your company culture into an everyday experience. They make your values real. Or not. They create clarity. Or confusion. They build trust. Or slowly chip away at it.
That’s why investing in middle management isn’t simply investing in a handful of people. You’re building capability that ripples through every team they lead.
So next time you promote your brilliant technical person, celebrate them. Then give them more than a new job title and a team to manage. Give them the tools to become a brilliant leader too.
Ready to Add Spice?
Great people leadership doesn’t happen simply because someone gets “Manager” added to their job title. It develops over time, through experience, feedback, good conversations, practical learning and having the right support around them.
Developing a great manager isn’t a one-and-done exercise. It’s about giving people the tools to lead well, opportunities to practise, support when things get tricky and the chance to keep building their capability as they grow.
Whether you’re developing your next generation of leaders or helping experienced managers strengthen the people side of their role, the important thing is to make leadership development intentional and ongoing.
At Spice, that’s where we can help, with practical leadership workshops, development planning, coaching and people frameworks that support managers to keep learning, growing and becoming better leaders.
Sometimes great managers need a little developing too.