And during that entire 20-plus year run, do you know how much formal management or leadership training I was given?
Zero. None.
Like millions of professionals, I was thrown into the deep end and told to swim. I was expected to figure it out on the fly. When I had two senior team members who couldn’t stand working together, I had to improvise a resolution. When a project fell behind schedule because a brilliant individual contributor didn’t know how to delegate, I had to step in and play referee. When I had to deliver difficult performance feedback, I had to guess my way through the conversation and hope I didn’t trigger an HR nightmare or a key resignation.
I survived, and eventually, I figured it out. But looking back as a business coach and peer board facilitator today, I realize just how flawed that entire mindset is.
In most organizations, we take our brightest, hardest-working people, hand them a team, and leave their development entirely up to them. We assume that because someone is exceptional at their core job, they’ll naturally know how to hold people accountable, navigate conflict, and drive strategy through others.
There’s an old management truth: work flows downward until it hits someone who can execute it. But if your frontline staff lacks the training or capacity to handle that load, the bottleneck reverses. Unfinished tasks bounce right back up to leadership, turning managers into overpaid coordinators.
When you leave management training up to the individual, you aren’t saving money. You’re paying for their learning curve in hidden ways every single day. You pay for it in high-performing employees who leave because their manager doesn’t know how to coach them. You pay for it in missed deadlines, project rework, and teams running in three different directions. And most of all, you pay for it with your own time—because every time an untrained manager gets stuck or avoids a hard conversation, you are the one who gets pulled back into the operational weeds to fix it.
It’s too expensive not to train your people.
Think about it this way: you would never hand the keys to your financial books to someone who has never studied accounting and tell them to “figure it out as they go.” Yet, business owners hand over their single most expensive asset—their workforce—to managers who have never been taught how to lead.
Your managers don’t want to fail. Most of them are desperate for the tools, frameworks, and language to handle tough conversations, keep their teams aligned, and stop putting out daily fires. But intuition only takes a leader so far. When you give them structured, practical training, you aren’t just doing them a favor. You are building a repeatable system that protects your culture, drives execution, and frees you up to focus on growing the company.
Stop leaving your leadership pipeline to chance.
Ready to build a real management development engine in your company?
On September 1, I am co-hosting an exclusive webinar: Management & Leadership Development Training. We’ll be breaking down how to equip your leadership team with the actual toolkit they need to drive results, reduce turnover, and take the burden off your shoulders.