Article Summary
- Why leadership development is a journey, and not just about a role or promotion.
- The importance of unlearning outdated habits and building self-awareness.
- How organisations can support leaders with structured feedback, mentorship, and reflection practices.
No one becomes a great leader overnight. Many managers earn their roles through high performance, technical expertise or a relentless drive to deliver. But leadership isn’t just a more senior version of management. It’s something else entirely.
Leadership is developed, slowly, often uncomfortably, through reflection, feedback and experience. As executive coach Marshall Goldsmith puts it: “What got you here won’t get you there.”1 The very behaviours that make someone a successful individual contributor, for example tactical focus, can get in the way of being an effective leader. Leadership requires a shift in mindset: from doing to enabling, from control to trust, and from personal delivery to collective growth.
Yet managers are not always supported to make this shift. In the UK 82% of managers become leaders without any formal training.2 Many step into leadership through circumstance or technical skill, not preparation or developmental design. These so-called ‘accidental managers’ are then expected to drive performance, support wellbeing and embody organisational values. If most managers didn’t plan for leadership, what will help them succeed in it?
Making the leap: from manager to leader
Many managers step into leadership roles believing they have reached a career milestone but the reality often feels different. Rather than finding certainty new leaders encounter fresh challenges: balancing performance with people development, maintaining confidence while staying open to feedback and leading with authority while remaining authentic.
The early stages of leadership can feel overwhelming. So it’s no surprise that Investors in People’s new research finds that, when asked what would make management roles in their organisations more desirable and sustainable, employees ranked good training and preparation before stepping into management as their top priority (55%).3
More than a third (38%) also agreed managers should receive ongoing coaching and mentoring and 35% believed organisations need to offer a clearer path from middle management to senior leadership.
Harvard Business School highlights the fundamental difference: managers work with processes; leaders work with people. Managers focus on delivery; leaders focus on direction. Managers implement; leaders influence.4
Or, as HBS professor John Kotter says, leadership is “the creation of positive, non-incremental change, including the creation of a vision to guide that change.” In contrast, management is about maintaining systems, coordinating resources and executing on current goals.
Leadership coach Doc Norton puts it succinctly: “Having the position of manager does not make you a leader. The best managers are leaders, but the two are not synonymous. Leadership is the result of action. If you act in a way that inspires, encourages or engages others, you are a leader. It doesn’t matter your title or position.”5
Moving from manager to leader means shifting focus from what you control to how you inspire, support and enable others.
We invest in people
3-YEAR PEOPLE MANAGEMENT ACCREDITATION
Understand your organisation’s performance by leading, supporting and improving your people & strategy!
Assess how your organisation is performing against our framework – focusing on employee engagement, communication, organisational culture, and work practices.
The unlearning curve
Goldsmith’s insight is especially relevant here: many successful managers don’t need to learn more. Instead they need to unlearn. Habits like always needing to be right, controlling every detail or seeking constant recognition can hold leaders back. What once worked now gets in the way.
That’s why growth starts not with ambition but with humility. To lead well managers must learn to pause, listen, reflect and let go. They need support to shift their identity from ‘doer’ to ‘enabler.’
At the heart of this shift is self-awareness. Research by Korn Ferry based on 6,977 employee self-assessments shows that organisations with more self-aware people enjoy significantly better financial performance. During the 30 months from 2010 to 2013 companies whose employees had fewer “blind spots” outperformed peers, a correlation of 20% fewer blind spots and markedly stronger stock returns. Poor-performing companies’ employees were 79% more likely to have low overall self-awareness than those at firms with robust rate of return.6
Crucially, this mindset isn’t innate. Rigorous leadership development programmes that combine 360° feedback and coaching help leaders uncover and address hidden blind spots. That learning not only transforms individuals but also strengthens organisational resilience.
Feedback, reflection, and honest conversations are essential. But without a supportive structure, many managers feel isolated and unsure. That’s why the We Invest in People framework embeds Developing Leadership Capability and Delivering Continuous Improvement into the DNA of leadership. It encourages leaders to evolve continuously, not just when something goes wrong. For leadership is not a finish line. Organisations that treat leadership development as a tick-box exercise miss the point. The best leaders are not static but adaptive, curious and willing to keep growing.
Why learning from mistakes matters
There’s no growth without challenge. The best leaders learn from mistakes and the most effective managers are those who engage with setbacks productively. Research underscores this: A study from Ohio State University Fisher College of Business found that when leaders openly reflect on mistakes exhibit greater humility and, in the right context, their team perform better as a result.7
Harvard Business Review professor Amy Edmondson notes that leaders who assess failure through ‘after-action reviews’ treat errors as data, avoid blame and unlock insights that lead to growth. She talks of a new paradigm: “one that recognises the inevitability of failure in today’s complex work organisations. Those that catch, correct, and learn from failure before others do will succeed.”8
Entrepreneur Sara Davies’ leadership evolution, from founder to CEO, reflects this reality. Her ability to learn from setbacks, seek out honest feedback and adjust direction models the resilient leadership that these studies show is both possible and valuable.
Reframing manager wellbeing as strategic infrastructure
There is often a reluctance to focus on manager wellbeing, as if acknowledging the pressure undermines authority. But ignoring it is more damaging. Managers are people first and when they’re unsupported their teams feel it.
As we point out in our white paper The Broken Ladder: Why managers are avoiding manager roles – and how to fix it : “Managers need the scaffolding, space and support to manage well – and all too often the pressures of everyday commercial delivery push this down the agenda.”
More than a third of business leaders surveyed for the white paper say balancing employee wellbeing with business targets is one of the most demanding parts of management. The tension between performance and people support is real. But it is not an excuse for inaction.
Organisations that thrive in the next decade will not be those that load more onto managers and expect resilience to be endless. They will be those that equip managers to work sustainably, humanely, and successfully.
View from the Community
“Early in my career I attended various management programmes, each designed to shape future leaders and develop core competencies which help prepare you for the responsibilities that come with leadership.
I believed that attending these programmes helped with leadership development however I didn’t fully realise where my gaps in knowledge were and what leadership development I required until I joined my current employer, Cowens Group.
At Cowens, the culture encourages growth not just via attendance at training courses but by creating an environment where you are supported, challenged, and expected to apply what I have learnt in real life situations.
As Head of Operations, I deal with technical and personal challenges raised by staff daily. It’s a role that requires resilience, emotional intelligence, and clear decision-making under pressure. This could be quite overwhelming without the right tools, support, guidance or mindset. I’m lucky to have a management team that provides a supportive and psychologically safe environment where I can ask questions, challenge decisions and make mistakes without the fear of being judged.
It’s important that I feel comfortable to adapt and grow, understand my own weaknesses as a leader and ask for help in areas where I feel less confident. It’s evident to me that the real work in becoming a leader is the work that is done after you’ve attended the training courses and its imperative that to become a successful leader you must have the right support network around you.”
Melanie King
Head of Operations, Cowens Survival Capability
Practical steps to support leadership growth
For organisations seeking to nurture managers into confident, self-aware leaders several actions make a lasting difference:
- Support unlearning: Create safe spaces to identify and release outdated habits that no longer serve leadership goals.
- Create structured feedback opportunities: Build regular, meaningful feedback into leadership development programmes.
- Support leadership reflection practices: Encourage reflective journaling, peer learning sets or coaching partnerships.
- Recognise people-development behaviours: Reward leaders who build strong teams and grow others and not just those who deliver individually.
- Offer mentorship programmes: Connect emerging leaders with mentors across the organisation.
- Normalise learning from failure: Share stories that highlight resilience and adaptation, not just success.
- Align leadership development with organisational values: Ensure leadership capability growth is anchored in the organisation’s purpose and culture.
Conclusion
Leadership evolves continuously with experience and learning. Managers who move into leadership roles thrive when they are supported to treat leadership as a craft, not a static achievement.
Self-awareness, adaptability and a commitment to continuous improvement define the leaders who inspire real change. They lead with presence, with purpose and with the courage to keep growing.
Investors in People’s framework recognises that leadership growth strengthens culture, performance and resilience. Leadership is not a badge. It is a journey – and the most successful organisations are those that walk that journey alongside their leaders.
This article is inspired by the theme of From Manager to Leader: Lessons in Growth, which Sar Davies will explore at the upcoming Investors in People Make Work Better conference. Join us there to discover how how leadership is built not in title but in trust, presence and progress.
Sources
- Goldsmith, M. (2007). What Got You Here Won’t Get You There.
- CMI, Better Management Report: Taking responsibility – why UK plc needs better managers https://www.managers.org.uk/knowledge-and-insights/research/better-management-report-take-responsibility-take-action/
- Investors in People (2025). The Broken Ladder: Why People are Avoiding Manager Roles – and how to fix it
- Harvard Business School Online. Leadership v. Management: What’s the Difference? (2019) https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/leadership-vs-management
- Forbes, What Makes A Good Leader? Key Differences Between Management And Leadership https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescoachescouncil/2017/11/20/what-makes-a-good-leader-key-differences-between-management-and-leadership/#5e6946cdaf5a
- Korn Ferry, A Better Return on Self-Awareness. https://www.kornferry.com/institute/647-a-better-return-on-self-awareness
- Jia (Jasmine) Hu, Shuxia Zhang, Robert B. Lount Jr, Bennett J. Tepper, When leaders heed the lessons of mistakes: Linking leaders’ recall of learning from mistakes to expressed humility 2022, https://doi.org/10.1111/peps.12570
- Amy C Edmondson, Strategies for Learning from Failure https://hbr.org/2011/04/strategies-for-learning-from-failure
