HR and L&D leaders
What should we give new managers besides a training course?
A mentor. A peer group. And someone who will give them honest feedback in the first six months when they need it most and are least likely to get it. Training courses give new managers frameworks and language. Those things are useful. The gap that almost every new manager falls into is not a knowledge gap — it’s the experience of suddenly being in authority over people they used to work alongside, having to make decisions they’ve never made before, and having nobody to talk to honestly about how it’s going.
Framework: Brian Hartzer’s Leadership Star · Practices: Care, Clarity, Clear the Way
A structured relationship with someone more experienced
Not mentoring in the formal, twice-a-year sense. A genuine, informal relationship with someone who has done the job before and who will answer the question “was that the right call?” without judgment. The specificity matters: a great engineer mentoring a new engineering manager, not a cross-functional programme with quarterly touchpoints.
A peer group who are in the same stage
First-time managers who can talk honestly to each other about what’s hard are enormously valuable to each other. The conversations they have — “I had to give someone feedback on their work and it went badly, what do I do now?” — can’t happen in a training room, and often can’t happen with a manager above them. Peer learning among people at the same stage, structured and given permission, is one of the most underutilised tools in leadership development.
Honest feedback in the first six months
Most new managers get almost no direct feedback on how they’re actually leading. Their own manager is focused on outcomes. Their team may be reluctant to say anything. A structured mechanism — a simple upward feedback process, a conversation with someone who has visibility to the team — gives the new manager signal while it’s still early enough to change course.
The Leadership Star as a practical framework
A simple, practical framework that a new manager can use in the room — not as a theory but as a set of questions they can ask themselves — closes the gap between good intent and good behaviour. The five practices give a new manager something to come back to when they’re unsure what to do next.
Think of the last person you promoted into management — who was the person outside their direct reporting line who they could talk to honestly in the first six months?
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