In brief
- When a manager struggles, the usual explanations are skills, fit, training or workload. Those are real, and they’re worth checking first.
- But there’s another variable that rarely gets considered: the culture the manager is expected to carry.
- When a company hasn’t named its culture, managers end up holding it together on their own, and that weight shows up in their performance.
Most leaders have watched it happen. Someone was great in their role, so they got promoted. A year later they’re struggling. Their team is frustrated, deadlines are slipping and they look exhausted.
The diagnosis usually comes quickly. They weren’t ready. They need training. Maybe they were never cut out to manage.
Sometimes that’s exactly right. But it isn’t the only possibility, and if it’s the only thing a company checks, it can miss what’s actually going on.
The usual reasons are real
I want to start here, because the common explanations for a struggling manager are common for a reason.
- They weren’t the right fit for the role. Being great at the work isn’t the same as being great at leading people who do it. Gallup has estimated that companies choose the wrong person for the manager job 82% of the time. I write about that choice in Performance vs. Potential: Who Should You Promote?
- They don’t have the skills yet. Delegating, giving feedback and handling conflict are learned, and many new managers were never taught.
- They were never prepared. A promotion with no transition is a common way to set someone up to struggle.
- The job is too big. More direct reports, more meetings and more responsibilities than one person can handle well.
Any of these can be the answer. Check them first. But if you’ve checked them and the struggle doesn’t make sense, or if several good managers are struggling in the same way, there’s another variable worth looking at.
Sometimes it’s the job, not the person
Gartner’s research on the manager role found that managers juggle 51% more responsibilities than they can effectively handle, and that changing the manager’s job itself is five times more effective than only improving their skills.
That’s an important shift. It means a company can send a manager to every leadership course available and still see them struggle, because the problem was never only their ability. It was also how much the role asks of them.
Another variable to consider: the culture they’re carrying
Here’s one I see often, and it rarely makes the list.
Managers aren’t only doing their own work and supporting their teams. They’re also carrying the company’s culture. Every time a team member asks “is this okay?” or “how do we handle this here?” the manager has to answer. When the company has named who it is and what it expects, that answer is easy to find. When it hasn’t, the manager has to come up with one on the spot.
That’s extra weight, and it adds up. The manager ends up caught between what leadership says and what the company actually rewards, supports or tolerates. They become the person holding the culture together for their team, with nothing to point to. Many HR people know that position well, because they’ve been in it too.
This doesn’t replace the other reasons. A manager can be the wrong fit and also be carrying an unnamed culture. But if a company only ever looks at the person, it can miss a weight that every one of its managers is carrying.
How to tell which one you’re looking at
| What you’re seeing | What it may point to |
|---|
| One manager struggles, and others in similar roles don’t | Fit, skills or preparation |
| A manager did well until their scope grew | The size of the job |
| Strong managers across the company struggle with the same issues | The job design, or the culture |
| Managers keep asking leadership “what do you want me to do here?” | An unnamed culture |
| The same situation gets handled differently on every team | An unnamed culture |
The last two are the ones to watch. When managers are looking for direction that doesn’t exist, or each one is improvising a different answer, the problem may not be any of them. I write more about what happens when each leader sets their own standard in What Is the Toxic Culture Pyramid™?, and about why a great manager can become a risk in Your Best Manager Is Your Biggest Risk.
What lightens the load
If fit or skills are the issue, the usual fixes apply: better selection, real preparation and development that continues after the promotion.
If the job is too big, look at what the role contains and what can come off it.
If the culture is part of it, give managers something to work from. Name the company’s personality, and describe what good looks like in how people work, so managers aren’t inventing the standard alone. That doesn’t take work away from managers. It takes away the guessing, which is often the heaviest part.
The verdict
When a manager struggles, the usual suspects deserve a look: fit, skills, preparation and the size of the job. But they aren’t the whole list.
Add one more question to it: what is this manager being asked to carry that the company never defined? If the answer is the culture itself, no amount of training will fully fix it. What helps is giving managers a clear standard to lead from, so they can spend their energy leading instead of guessing.
Questions worth asking
- When your last manager struggled, which explanations did you check, and which did you skip?
- Are several of your managers struggling with the same kinds of problems?
- If a manager asked “how do we handle this here?”, is there an answer they could point to?
Read next: People Quit When No One Defines What “Good” Looks Like
Frequently asked questions
Why do good employees struggle when they become managers?
Often because managing people takes different skills than doing the work, and many new managers aren’t prepared for the change. Other common reasons include poor fit, too much on their plate and, less often considered, carrying a culture the company never defined.
Is manager training enough to fix a struggling manager?
Sometimes. If the problem is skills, training helps. If the job is too big or the manager is filling in for an undefined culture, training alone won’t solve it.
How does company culture affect managers?
Managers answer the everyday questions about how things are done. When the company hasn’t named its culture, they have to invent those answers themselves, which adds weight and leads to different standards on different teams.
How can a company support struggling managers?
Check fit and skills, look at how much the role contains, and give managers a clear, shared standard for what good looks like so they aren’t defining it alone.
