Founders Series Vol 3: Suddenly a Manager

Somewhere in your company right now there is a person who was brilliant on Friday and bewildered on Monday. Last week they were your best engineer, your sharpest designer or your most reliable account lead, and this week they have four direct reports, a calendar full of 1:1s and no real idea what the job involves. The title usually arrives because the team grew and someone had to hold it, not because anyone sat down and designed the role or prepared them for it.

The Chartered Management Institute has a name for this person: the accidental manager. Their research with YouGov found that 82% of people who become managers in the UK have had no formal management or leadership training, and that almost a third of workers have left a job because of a negative workplace culture, with poor management sitting at the centre of it. An accidental manager in a 500-person company is a problem the organisation can absorb; in a 25-person startup they might be a third of your management layer.

Why does this happen in every startup?

It happens because promotion is often the only reward lever you have. You can’t always pay more, you probably don’t have a levelling framework yet, and the team has just doubled, so the person who is best at the work ends up in charge of the people doing the work. It feels like recognition at the time, but what you have actually done is move them into a different job, one they never applied for.

I wrote in Vol 1 about what happens when a technical founder’s role stops fitting the company growing around it, and this is the same problem one layer down. The qualities that made someone your best individual contributor, the deep focus, the personal output, being the one with the answers, are close to the opposite of what management asks of them: delegating properly, giving feedback that lands, sitting comfortably in ambiguity, and making pay and progression calls that affect someone’s life.

What does it cost you?

You rarely see the bill directly, because it arrives disguised as other things: a cluster of resignations under the same manager, a strong engineer quietly disengaging because their new boss can’t explain what progression looks like, or a grievance that started life as a badly delivered piece of feedback. In my experience people rarely leave startups because the mission stopped being interesting; they leave because the everyday experience of being managed is poor.

What I’d do instead

There are three things I would put in place, and none of them is expensive.

The first is to make management a choice rather than a prize. Some of your best people should never manage anyone, and they need a way to grow and be paid well without pretending otherwise, which is why even a rough individual-contributor track sketched on one page will stop you promoting people into jobs they will quietly hate. This is also some of the work I do most often: levelling frameworks and career pathing come up with almost every scaling team I work with, usually as a scoped project.

The second is to define what you actually expect. A new manager who knows they own three things, regular honest 1:1s, clear goals for their team, and pay and progression decisions that follow a framework rather than gut feel, is already ahead of most of the UK.

The third is to support them before they are drowning rather than after. That does not have to mean a leadership course; a couple of hours a month with someone who has built teams before, some real practice at giving feedback, and genuine permission to say “I don’t know how to handle this” will do more than any certificate.

This is exactly the kind of foundation work I do with founder-led teams, usually a few days a month, and the goal is always the one I wrote about in Vol 2: building managers who don’t need me. If you’re watching a brilliant Friday person struggle through their Mondays, here’s what fractional People leadership means in plain English, or you can read about the fractional HR Director and CHRO support I offer.

This is part of the Founders Series: the questions that keep you up. Previously: Vol 2: Why the goal of fractional HR is to make yourself redundant.