We Promote People Into Management and Pretend Nothing Happened

Most organizations treat a management promotion as a reward to celebrate, not a transition to support. That mismatch,  is the real reason so many capable new managers struggle.

About the author

Ashley Fina is Co-CEO and Founder of Oxygen, a manager training company that helps new and developing managers build the people skills the role actually requires. Before founding Oxygen, she was CEO of Michael C. Fina Recognition (now Halo), where she partnered with CEOs and leadership teams across hundreds of organizations on reward, recognition, and performance. Today she coaches executives and writes about what it really takes to turn great individual contributors into great managers. Connect with Ashley on LinkedIn or learn more at leadwithoxygen.com.

Key takeaways

• Becoming a manager is one of the largest identity shifts of a person's career, not just a title change or a short list of new skills to absorb.

• The strongest individual contributors often struggle most as new managers, because the behaviors that earned the promotion (personal output, being the expert) are the wrong instincts for the new role.

• Anthropology's rite-of-passage model explains the gap: organizations handle the "separation" (the promotion announcement) but skip the threshold and reincorporation stages, leaving new managers stranded in between.

• Managers account for roughly 70 percent of the variance in team engagement (Gallup), so an unsupported transition is expensive, and the fallout often escalates to HR.

• Treating management as a rite of passage means naming the transition out loud, redefining success from "doer" to "multiplier," and supporting it over months with frameworks, peers, and coaching, rather than a one-day workshop.

Why becoming a manager breaks the people we promote

Picture the moment someone gets promoted into management. There's an announcement, a wave of congratulations in the team channel, maybe a celebratory lunch. Everyone treats it as an arrival, a reward for being great at the job. And then, almost universally, the real support stops at exactly the point where it should begin.

We tend to think of a management promotion as a finish line. You were excellent at your work, so you earned the right to do more of it with a bigger title. But it isn't a finish line at all. It's the start of becoming a fundamentally different person at work, and it's one of the largest identity shifts most of us will ever go through. We just refuse to treat it that way.

I've spent years coaching leaders and managers, and the people who struggle most are rarely the ones you'd expect. They tend to be the strongest performers, promoted precisely because they were so good at the work. A few months in, a version of the same sentence surfaces almost every time: "I feel like I'm failing." What strikes me is that they aren't failing at anything they don't understand. They know the concepts. They've read the books. What has quietly collapsed underneath them is their sense of who they are at work. For their whole career they were the person with the answers, and now the job is to grow the people who are supposed to have them. Nobody told them that the very thing that made them successful is no longer what the role rewards.

So when a new manager struggles, we reach for the wrong diagnosis. We call it a skills gap and send them to a one-day workshop. Skills absolutely matter, and learning them well is part of what gives a new manager the confidence to lead. But skills-building dropped into a single workshop can’t, on its own, carry someone across an identity shift. 

The most consequential transition no one marks

Anthropologists have a useful frame for this. Arnold van Gennep, studying how cultures move people from one life stage to the next, described every rite of passage as having three parts: separation from the old role, a threshold period of transition, and reincorporation into the new one. Becoming a parent, a citizen, a spouse: every society wraps these crossings in ritual, because the crossing is hard and the person needs to be carried across it.

Now look at how we promote managers. We do the separation part beautifully. You're a manager now. New title, maybe a new pay band, an announcement in the team channel. And then we leave people stranded in the threshold, the messy middle where you are no longer an individual contributor but not yet a manager, with no map and no acknowledgment that you're standing in between. There is no reincorporation. There is, at best, "Congratulations, good luck."

This is why so much new-manager struggle looks emotional rather than technical. The fear of giving hard feedback, the imposter voice asking "who am I to tell them this," the instinct to just do the work yourself because at least you know it'll be right: those aren't knowledge problems. They are the symptoms of a person stuck in the threshold, still operating from an identity the new role has quietly retired.

Why the old identity becomes a liability

Here's the cruel part. The behaviors that earned someone the promotion are often the behaviors that sink them in the new role. The strongest individual contributor is rewarded for personal output, for being the one who delivers. Make that person a manager and their old definition of success points them in precisely the wrong direction. They hold on to the work. They become the bottleneck their team has to route around. Or they swing the other way and avoid the parts of the job that feel most unlike their old self, which usually means the hard conversations.

And the cost doesn't stay contained. Gallup has found that managers account for roughly 70 percent of the variance in team engagement. When a manager is stuck in that threshold, the whole team feels it, and eventually the people team feels it too, because the conversations that should happen at the manager level escalate to theirs.

What it looks like to honor the crossing

So what would it look like to actually treat this transition as a rite of passage instead of a calendar event? It isn't about a ceremony with balloons. It's about doing the two parts we skip.

First, mark the threshold honestly. Tell people, out loud, that they are stepping into a different kind of work and that the discomfort they feel is the role changing them, not evidence they were the wrong pick. My background before Oxygen was in rewards and recognition, and the thing I learned over and over is that the moments we choose to acknowledge are the moments people build their identity around. The promotion into management is the highest-stakes, least-recognized moment in most careers. That is a strange thing to leave unmarked. Part of marking it honestly is giving people permission to be new: making clear that perfection isn’t expected, that it’s okay not to have all the answers yet, and that asking for help is a sign they’re taking the role seriously, not a sign they’re failing at it.

Second, hand people a new definition of success and the support to grow into it. A manager's job is not to be the best doer in the room. It's to multiply other people. That shift has to be made concrete: redefining what the manager is now responsible for, giving them frameworks they can use the same week, and putting them in a room with peers crossing the same threshold so that when one person admits "I struggle with giving feedback," ten others say "me too" and the shame loses its grip. This is why a one-day workshop can't do the work. Identity shifts don't happen in a classroom on a Tuesday. They happen over months, in the real moments, with people walking alongside you.

Concretely, here is what honoring the crossing can look like, starting the day someone is promoted: 

• Name the transition out loud.
  Mark the promotion in a real conversation, not just an announcement, and say plainly that this is a different kind of role and a genuine milestone.

• Give permission to ask for help.
  Set the expectation early that perfection isn’t required, that not having every answer yet is normal, and that raising a hand is part of doing the job well.

• Redefine success on paper.
  Rewrite what the person is now responsible for, moving the scoreboard from personal output to the growth and performance of their team.

• Teach real skills, early and reinforced.
  Give them concrete frameworks for delegation, feedback, and accountability, and let them practice with their actual team, because building real skill is what builds real confidence.

• Surround them with peers and a coach.
  Put them in a cohort of people crossing the same threshold, and pair them with a coach for the moments that feel too raw to raise in a group.

• Keep their own manager in the loop.
  Make the new manager’s supervisor part of the journey, so the support continues long after the announcement fades.

That belief is most of why I helped build Oxygen. When I was coaching executives, the same ache kept surfacing: "I have all this drama bubbling up, and my people don't actually know how to lead." These weren't bad managers. They were capable people who had been pushed across a threshold and left to find their footing alone. Management Essentials and the coaching and Growth Groups around it exist to walk people through the crossing rather than just announce it.

The reframe: stop promoting, start carrying people across

If your new managers are struggling, it's worth asking a broader question than the usual one. Not only "what skill are they missing," but also: "have we actually helped this person become someone new, or did we just change their title and wish them luck?"

The organizations that get this right stop treating management as a promotion and start treating it as a passage. They build managers who genuinely become managers, instead of brilliant individual contributors quietly drowning in a role nobody helped them grow into.

If that's a gap you recognize in your own organization, I'd love to talk about it. You can learn more about how we develop managers or book a conversation with me directly. The transition is going to happen either way. The only question is whether we leave people to make it alone.