Why Good Employees Become Bad Managers (And How to Stop Creating Them)
You didn't hire a bad manager. You created one. The good news: that means you can fix it.
About the Author
Nick Herinckx is the Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Oxygen, a manager development academy helping high-growth companies close the execution gap. A former fast-scaling CEO and longtime executive coach, Nick has helped hundreds of leaders build stronger, more effective teams. Follow him at @NickHerinckx.
Overview
Most "bad managers" aren't bad hires. They're strong individual contributors who were promoted into management, given no training, and then blamed when they struggled. The problem is structural, not personal. And it's fixable.
The cause: Companies promote people for being great at the job, not for the ability to manage, then provide no training on how to set expectations, delegate, coach, or hold hard conversations.
The pattern: Untrained managers default to doing the work themselves, the team stops growing, the manager burns out, and leadership concludes the person "isn't cut out for it."
Why it matters: Gallup finds managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement, yet companies pick the wrong person for the role about 82% of the time.
The fix: Not better hiring or a personality test — giving managers a safe place to practice the hard skills before the stakes are real, with live feedback and real reps.
The Management Readiness Fallacy
We'd never hand someone a scalpel and tell them to figure out surgery on the patient. We'd never put someone in a cockpit and hope they pick up flying somewhere over the Atlantic. The stakes are too obvious, and the gap between "smart person" and "trained professional" is too wide to pretend it isn't there.
But we do exactly this with new managers, constantly. We take the best engineer, the top salesperson, the sharpest account lead, hand them a new title and a set of direct reports, and trust that competence at one job will magically transfer to a completely different one. Then, a few quarters later, when it hasn't, we decide the problem is the person.
I've coached hundreds of senior leaders. When their management team is struggling, the explanation I hear most often is some version of "they're just not cut out for it." It's rarely true. And it quietly lets the company off the hook for the thing that actually went wrong.
It also misses how much is riding on getting this right. Gallup's analysis of 2.7 million employees found that managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement. If you know nothing about an employee except who their manager is, you can predict their engagement with surprising accuracy. So when a manager struggles, it isn't a contained problem. It's the single biggest lever you have on the whole team's performance.
Here's the thing, though: most "bad managers" aren't bad hires. They're good people who were handed a job nobody taught them to do. The failure didn't start with them. It started with a system that promotes people into management and then leaves them to figure it out in front of a live team.
Here's how I’ve seen the system play out.
The promotion nobody questioned
Someone gets great at the work, so they become the obvious next promotion. The title changes. The job changes. Nobody asks whether they want to manage, and nobody checks whether they can.
This is the original mistake, and it's so common we've stopped noticing it. We treat "manager" as the trophy for being excellent at a job that has almost nothing to do with managing. Being a brilliant individual contributor is about doing the work. Managing is about getting work done through other people. Those are different skills, and one does not come bundled with the other.
The data backs this up uncomfortably well. Gallup estimates that companies pick the candidate with the right talent for the manager job only about 18% of the time — meaning they get it wrong 82% of the time — and that only about 1 in 10 people have the natural talent to manage well. We take our best doer, ask them to stop doing the thing they're best at, and act surprised when the transition is hard. It's the scalpel again. We confused "good at the field" with "ready to lead in it."
The training that never happened
What does a newly promoted manager actually receive? An org chart update and a calendar full of new one-on-ones.
What they don't receive is any instruction on how to set expectations, how to delegate, how to coach, or how to hold a conversation nobody wants to have. No one shows them what good looks like. There's no practice, no feedback, no safe place to be bad at it first.
In most companies, manager training is what happens after the manager is already in trouble. We wait until the team is unhappy, results are slipping, and HR is involved. Then we send the manager to a workshop. By that point we're not building a skill. We're trying to reverse a reputation.
Go back to the cockpit. Nobody learns to fly by being handed the controls mid-flight with passengers on board. They train in a simulator first, where a mistake is a lesson instead of a disaster. We somehow accept for managers what we'd find insane anywhere the stakes are visible. Except the stakes here are just as real. They're the careers, confidence, and morale of everyone on that new manager's team.
The default that looks like leadership
Drop a person into a role with no training and a real team depending on them, and they'll fall back on the one thing they know how to do well: the work itself.
So that's what they do. They take the harder assignments. They redo the report instead of coaching the person who wrote it. They stay later than everyone else and call it leading by example.
It feels responsible. It feels like leadership. It's the opposite. Every task a manager pulls back onto their own plate is a task their team never learned to own. Every problem they quietly fix is one the team will bring them again next week. The manager sinks deeper, the team grows more dependent, and both sides mistake exhaustion for effort.
It's worth being clear: this manager isn't lazy or incompetent. They're behaving exactly the way their training prepared them to: for the old job. When you don't know how to develop people, relying on the skill you're sure of is the rational move. The system handed them a hammer and is now disappointed they're not using a saw.
The verdict that misdiagnoses everything
A few quarters in, the team isn't growing, the manager is burned out, and senior leaders are losing patience. That's the moment the conversation turns to "they're just not cut out for this," and the proposed fix is usually a personality assessment, a quiet exit, or both.
Here's what's wrong with that verdict: it diagnoses the person when the failure was structural. We promoted them without asking. We didn't train them. We let them default to doing instead of leading. Then, when the entirely predictable thing happened, we decided it was a flaw in their character.
That's not just unfair — it's expensive. You lose a strong contributor, spend months backfilling the role, take a hit to team morale, and do all of it while the actual root cause sits untouched, waiting to do the same thing to the next person you promote.
The fix isn't who you hire. It's how you prepare them
The instinct, once leaders see this, is to fix the front end. Tighten the hiring bar. Add a personality test. Get better at spotting who's "manager material" before promoting them.
Wrong lever. You can't assess your way out of a development problem. No test turns an untrained manager into a trained one. And the hunt for the person who's naturally "cut out for it" is really just a way of dodging the more boring truth: management is a set of skills, and skills are built through practice.
The fix is giving managers a place to practice the hard stuff before it's real. Before the feedback conversation that actually matters. Before the underperforming hire they have to address. Before the moment the team needs them to be the manager they were never taught to be.
That's the simulator the cockpit gets and the manager almost never does. You let them rehearse setting expectations, delegating, coaching, and navigating the conversation everyone dreads — somewhere getting it wrong is part of the process, not a permanent mark on their record. You give them reps. You give them feedback in real time. You let them be awkward at it first, the way anyone is awkward at anything before they're good.
It works. When the fast-growing fintech MrQ put its newly promoted managers through this kind of layered, practice-based development, the share rated "excellent" at delegation jumped from 4% to 22%, and at constructive feedback from 0% to 22% — in the skills that actually make or break a team. You can read the full MrQ case study here.
That's exactly what we built Management Essentials to do: a cohort-based program where new and developing managers practice the real work of leading people — live, with feedback, before the stakes are high. Not a workshop you send someone to once they're already drowning. The training that should have happened at the promotion.
So before you decide your management team isn't cut out for it, ask the harder question: did you ever actually teach them to manage? If the honest answer is no, then you didn't hire a bad manager.
You created one. Now you can create a better one.
Stop creating bad managers
Management Essentials gives your managers the chance to practice the hard conversations, delegation, and coaching before the stakes are real — so they grow into the role instead of burning out in it.
Learn more about Management Essentials
