The leadership gap: why 82% of managers are leading without a map

When I started Stone by Stone Leadership, people would sometimes ask me what problem I was trying to solve. My answer was always the same.

Most people who end up leading teams were never taught how to do it.

That is not a dramatic claim. It is just true. The majority of managers in organisations right now were promoted because they were good at something else, and then left to figure out the rest. Some of them do. Many of them struggle, quietly, for years. And the people they lead feel that struggle whether the manager is aware of it or not.

The Chartered Management Institute put a number on this in 2023. 82% of managers entering leadership roles have had no formal management or leadership training. 82%. That is not a fringe problem or a quirk of a particular industry. It is the norm.

How it happens

Nobody sets out to create a leadership gap. It happens gradually, through decisions that seem reasonable at the time.

Someone is brilliant at their job. They are reliable, capable, well-liked. A management role opens up and they are the obvious choice. The organisation promotes them, hands them a team and moves on to the next thing. The assumption, usually unspoken, is that being good at the work translates into being good at leading people who do the work.

It does not. The skills are different. Being technically excellent does not teach you how to have a hard conversation, how to give feedback someone can actually hear, how to build trust across a team with different personalities and needs, or how to hold people accountable without damaging the relationship. Those things require deliberate learning. And most managers are never given the opportunity to do that learning before they need to use it.

So they improvise. They model the managers they had, for better or worse. They default to what feels natural, which is not always what works. They develop habits that can take years to unpick.

What the gap actually costs

There is a version of this conversation that stays abstract. Leadership development is important. We should invest in our people. And so on.

The CMI research makes it concrete. One in three people have left a job because of a bad manager or a toxic workplace culture. Of those workers who did not rate their manager as effective, half planned to leave within the year. Only 15% of employees with an ineffective manager felt valued and respected, compared to 72% of those with an effective one.

The cost of replacing an employee typically runs between 50% and 200% of their annual salary. That is before you account for lost knowledge, disrupted team dynamics and the time spent on recruitment. Poor management is expensive in ways that are often invisible on a balance sheet but very visible to the people experiencing them.

Beyond retention, untrained managers are less likely to spot problems early. They are less likely to challenge bad behaviour. They are more likely to let issues compound until they become crises. The CMI research found that managers with formal training are significantly more likely to call out wrongdoing or raise concerns compared to those without training.

The industries where this hits hardest

Every industry has this problem, but some feel it more acutely than others.

Hospitality is a good example. Career progression in kitchens and front-of-house is often rapid and driven by technical skill. A talented chef becomes a sous chef. A capable sous chef becomes a head chef. The assumption at every stage is that excellence in cooking translates into excellence in running a kitchen team.

It rarely does, and not because the people involved are not capable of it. It is because running a kitchen team is a separate skill set. Communication under pressure. Accountability without aggression. Building a culture where people want to show up. Giving feedback in a way that actually lands. None of those things come automatically from knowing how to cook well.

The same pattern plays out in professional services, in healthcare, in construction, in retail. Wherever promotion is based primarily on technical performance and management skills are treated as something people will pick up along the way, the gap opens up.

The thing that changes it

Formal training is part of it. But I want to be careful not to reduce this to a box-ticking exercise, because the organisations that do this well are not just sending people on courses.

What actually changes things is creating an environment where leaders are expected to keep developing. Where asking for support is normal. Where feedback flows in both directions. Where the standard for leadership is not just output but how the output was achieved and at what cost to the people involved.

That requires a shift in culture as much as a shift in training provision. And culture shifts are harder than scheduling a workshop. They require consistent signalling from the top about what is valued and what is not.

The organisations that get this right tend to have leaders at the senior level who are themselves visibly committed to their own development. It is very hard to build a learning culture in a team if the person leading the team treats their own learning as finished.

Where to start

If you are reading this as someone who leads a team, the most useful thing I can offer is not a framework or a checklist. It is a question.

What do you actually know about how your leadership lands?

Not what you hope. Not what you assume. Not what people tell you when the relationship dynamic makes honesty difficult. What do the people you lead actually experience when they are working for you?

Most managers have never asked that question directly. Some are afraid of the answer. But the organisations and the individuals who are willing to find out, and then do something with what they learn, are the ones that close the gap.

Everything else follows from that.