In many organisations, management is still the main, or only, visible route to career progression. That creates a predictable problem: there are always more people with management ambitions than there are management roles available.
Some will get promoted when they’re ready. Others get promoted when a role opens up. And too many find themselves managing people without the preparation, self-awareness or support to do it well.
This article answers the question directly: how do people become managers, and how should organisations prepare them? We’ll draw on general guidance and the principles behind effective management development, illustrated by King’s College London’s Aspiring Manager Series, which LTT designed and delivered to address exactly this challenge.
In this article you’ll learn:
- Why preparing employees for management roles matters for retention and performance
- How to identify and develop future managers deliberately
- What an aspiring manager programme can look like in practice
- How to manage and develop staff even when management isn’t their only route
Why Preparing Employees to Become Managers Matters
Preparing employees to become managers matters, particularly when management seems the only clear path forward – otherwise ambition and opportunity quickly fall out of sync. People who want to progress feel pressure to pursue management roles regardless of whether they’re the right fit, while those who don’t secure a role feel stuck. Both groups disengage, and the organisation feels it in retention and performance.
The business case for doing this differently is clear:
- Treating management as the only progression option creates bottlenecks and leaves high performers with nowhere visible to go
- Unmanaged career ambitions are a significant driver of voluntary turnover: people who can’t see a path forward tend to find one elsewhere
- A structured pathway for aspiring managers improves individual readiness, organisational confidence in new hires to leadership roles and the quality of management across the organisation
Research cited by Forbes and sourced from CCL Innovation found that nearly 60% of first-time managers receive no training when they take on the role, and 26% say they didn’t feel ready to lead others. King’s College London recognised this risk early and came to LTT to build something better.
How Do People Become Managers Today?
The traditional route is promotion based on tenure or technical excellence. The assumption is that strong individual performance will translate into strong people leadership. It sometimes does. More often, it doesn’t.
As Forbes/Kellogg School of Management research sets out, the move from individual contributor to people manager is arguably the most difficult career transition in business. The skills shift is fundamental: from doing excellent work yourself to enabling others to do it, from managing your own output to holding accountability for a team’s performance, development and wellbeing.
Emerging best practice addresses this by separating people leadership from technical progression. That means:
- Defining what great managers look like in your specific context, in terms of behaviours, skills and outcomes, before identifying candidates
- Identifying leadership potential through a mix of performance data, observed behaviour, peer and manager feedback and expressed interest rather than technical performance alone
- Creating structured development pathways that build readiness before promotion, including mentoring, stretch assignments, coaching and formal learning
- Making non-management progression routes visible and genuinely valued so people have real choices rather than one default path
Management and leadership: what great looks like gives you a practical framework for defining that standard in your organisation.
The Challenge: Management as the Only Career Development Option
King’s College London came to us with a problem many large, complex organisations recognise. They had a substantial pool of employees with management ambitions, a limited number of management roles and a real risk that talented people would stagnate or leave if nothing changed.
The pool was diverse. Some wanted management because they were genuinely driven by leading and developing others. Some had set their sights on it because it seemed like the logical next step, rather than because it was the right one. Others had already applied for roles, been unsuccessful and received little in the way of developmental feedback to help them understand why or what to do next. The result was a large group of people in limbo, waiting for direction.
Why This Is a Risk for Any Organisation
This dynamic isn’t unique to higher education or to KCL’s size. Any organisation where management is the primary progression route, and where supply of roles is lower than demand, will face the same tension. Left unaddressed, it shows up as disengagement, a quiet talent drain and variable manager quality as roles are filled from the available pool rather than the ready one.
The building blocks of talent management sets out how to approach this systematically. And our succession planning whitepaper covers the pipeline planning that sits behind it.
The Main Issue: Empowering Employees to Navigate Their Careers
Career ownership sits with the individual. Organisations and line managers play an important role in creating opportunity, providing feedback and making pathways clear, but the employee has to be in the driving seat. If someone isn’t clear on what they want and why, no programme will resolve that.
Resetting How Employees Think About Careers
Part of the work at KCL was broadening people’s sense of what career progression could look like. Lateral moves, specialist tracks, cross-functional projects and added responsibility within a current role are all legitimate ways to grow. When organisations make these options visible and actively valued, people have real choices. The conversation shifts from “how do I get a management role?” to “what does the right next step look like for me?”
Clarifying “Is Management Right for Me?”
Before any development work begins, aspiring managers benefit from honest self-reflection. Useful questions to work through include:
- Do I want to develop and be responsible for others, or do I primarily want to do excellent work myself?
- Am I energised by accountability for a team’s performance and wellbeing, or does that feel like a distraction from the work I’m best at?
- What’s driving my interest in management: is it about the contribution I could make, or mainly about status, salary or being seen to progress?
- Can I adjust my approach for different people, and am I genuinely curious about how others think and work?
Some people work through these questions and confirm their commitment. Others realise that a specialist or project-based path suits them better, and that clarity is worth more than pushing ahead with the wrong goal.
Our Approach: Training the Next Generation of Managers
Designing an Aspiring Manager Programme
For King’s College London, LTT designed the Aspiring Manager Series: a concentrated five-week intervention built around two clear objectives. First, to help participants assess their own readiness honestly. Second, to give them a practical development plan to act on, whether their next step was management or something different.
The programme combined psychometric tools to benchmark strengths, management styles and personal drivers, live coaching sessions and four structured training modules. It was intentionally concentrated: a short, focused intervention rather than a drawn-out programme, designed to create momentum and surface clarity quickly.
Topics covered included:
- Building self-awareness and confidence
- Career mapping and intentional development planning
- Creating meaningful connections and building professional networks
- Career conversations with line managers
- Basic people management skills
As one participant put it: “It was great to recognise that some of the traits I already have could become management traits.”
Skills and Behaviours to Create Great Managers
Any organisation designing a similar intervention should prioritise these core capabilities:
- Self-awareness and confidence: understanding your strengths, development areas and impact on others before trying to lead them
- Career mapping and intentional planning: knowing where you want to go and taking active ownership of getting there
- Building meaningful connections: developing the networks that support both personal development and effective leadership from day one
- Career and feedback conversations: the ability to have honest, forward-looking conversations with your own manager and, in time, with direct reports
- Foundational people management skills: delegation, giving and receiving feedback, coaching basics and performance conversations
These are learnable skills that develop with the right structure, feedback and support.
What We Learned About Preparing Aspiring Managers
Not Everyone Should Be a Manager, and That’s OK
One of the most valuable outcomes from the King’s College programme was that some participants concluded management wasn’t the right path for them. They left with clarity and redirected their energy into specialist or project-based development. A manager who doesn’t genuinely want to manage creates problems for their team. A specialist who’s clear on their path is an asset.
Supporting Employees Who Do Become Managers
Participants who confirmed their intention to pursue management left with something concrete: a development plan, a clearer understanding of the skills they needed to build and a set of relationships to draw on. As research highlights, the transition from individual contributor to people leader is arguably the most difficult career move a person makes. The difference between those who navigate it well and those who struggle is almost always preparation rather than ability.
Empowerment and Ownership
The consistent theme across the programme was ownership. Whatever their goals, from leadership to technical expertise, participants left feeling that their career was theirs to shape. That sense of agency is what makes development programmes stick beyond the intervention itself.
How to Prepare Your Management Team for the Future
Whether you’re building a formal programme or taking a more incremental approach, to prepare your management team for the future, these steps form the foundation of an effective managerial pipeline:
- Define what great managers look like in your context: Competency frameworks and behaviour-based standards give you a shared language and a development target that’s grounded in your specific culture and strategy. Our competency framework whitepaper is a practical starting point.
- Identify potential managers early, using multiple sources of evidence: Technical performance is a poor predictor of management capability on its own. Combine it with observed behaviour, peer and manager feedback and expressed interest to build a more reliable picture.
- Offer aspiring manager programmes that blend self-awareness, career exploration, coaching and core skills: Don’t wait until someone is in the role to start their development.
- Use mentoring and stretch assignments to build experience before promotion: Real responsibility in a supported context builds confidence and reveals whether management is a genuine fit before the stakes are high.
- Provide ongoing learning and support after people are appointed: Development doesn’t stop at promotion. Workshops, peer communities and coaching all sustain capability over time.
- Keep non-management career paths visible and valued: The most sustainable way to avoid forcing people into management is to make the alternatives genuinely attractive.
Presenting Your People with a World of Possibilities
Preparing employees to become managers is one part of a broader commitment to career development. The organisations that do it well create cultures where people can see a meaningful future, whether that’s in people leadership or somewhere else entirely. Linear promotions aren’t the only route to growth, and making that real for your people takes deliberate effort.
At Let’s Talk Talent, our management and leadership consultancy supports organisations at every stage of this work, from defining what great management looks like to designing aspiring manager programmes and building the development structures that sustain quality leadership over time.
If you’d like help designing an aspiring manager pathway or preparing your management team for the future, get in touch with the team.
FAQs About Preparing Employees to Become Great Managers
How do you prepare an employee to become a manager?
Start before the promotion, not after. Help them build self-awareness, develop core people skills and get honest clarity on whether management is what they genuinely want. Structured programmes, mentoring, stretch assignments and regular career conversations all contribute. The goal is to make the transition deliberate rather than accidental.
What skills should aspiring managers develop first?
Self-awareness comes first: understanding your own strengths, blind spots and impact on others. From there, the priorities are giving and receiving feedback effectively, having meaningful career conversations and building the foundational skills of delegation and coaching. These underpin everything else a manager does.
How do people typically become managers in organisations today?
In many organisations, management is still awarded based on tenure or strong technical performance. Emerging best practice moves away from this by identifying leadership potential early, defining what good management looks like in context and creating structured pathways that build readiness before promotion rather than hoping it develops on the job.
How can we prepare our management team for the future?
Define the standard, identify potential early, invest in deliberate development before and after promotion and keep non-management paths equally visible. Our management and leadership consultancy can help you design an approach that fits your organisation’s context and pipeline needs.
What if an employee decides management isn’t right for them?
That’s a good outcome for the individual and the organisation. A manager who doesn’t want to manage creates real problems for their team. Helping someone reach that conclusion early, with clarity and credible alternatives, is far more valuable than placing them in a role that isn’t the right fit. Make sure specialist and lateral pathways are visible and respected so people have somewhere meaningful to go.
