Nobody taught you how to do this

Reminder: It’s time for your Weekly 1:1™

Today’s agenda: Nobody taught you how to do this

The question on the table: What would have been different if someone had?

Before we start: Pour another cup of tea and take a few minutes for yourself. This one is worth sitting with.

At some point in your career, someone decided you were ready.

Maybe it was a conversation with your manager. Maybe it was a formal review process, or a reorganization that created an opening, or simply the fact that you had been there long enough and done well enough that the next step seemed obvious. However it happened, you got the title. You got the congratulations. You may have even gotten a new office or a bump in pay.

And then everyone moved on - back to their own priorities, their own deadlines, their own list of things to get done.

It’s very possible that nobody told you this: the job you were just given is fundamentally different from the job you just left. The skills that made you good enough to get promoted are not the same skills that will make you good at what comes next. Leading people is a different discipline entirely. And most organizations treat it like it isn’t.

The Center for Creative Leadership - whose work I have deep respect for as an alumni - has found that nearly 60% of first-time managers never received any training when they transitioned into their first leadership role. The Chartered Management Institute puts it even higher, at 82%. And Gartner reports that 60% of new managers fail within their first 24 months, largely because of the absence of that training.

Those are not small numbers.

What those statistics don’t capture is what it actually feels like to be on the inside of that experience. The added layer of pressure that comes with being expected to perform something nobody taught you. The careful management of your own uncertainty, because you can’t exactly tell your boss you’re not sure you know what you’re doing - not when they were the one who decided you were ready. So you figure it out quietly, on your own, while projecting confidence you may not fully feel yet.

Most people white-knuckle their way through it. Some figure it out eventually. Some never quite do.

That early experience of being thrown in without a net leaves a mark. It shapes how people see themselves as leaders, how much they trust their own judgment, and whether they ever feel fully prepared - or just perpetually catching up.

The good news is that it doesn’t have to stay that way. Leadership is a learnable discipline. The skills that nobody handed you when you got promoted can still be developed, at any stage, with the right support.

That’s one version of this story. There’s another - the leader who steps in feeling genuinely ready, and still finds themselves needing something they can’t quite name. That’s a conversation for another day.

The support that nobody handed you when you got promoted doesn’t have an expiration date. If you’re curious about what that kind of support actually looks like, I’m hosting a complimentary conversation on May 7th with Elissa Zylbershlag about exactly that - whether coaching is worth it, and what it looks like in practice. Register here: englishsg.com/webinars.

The question I’ll leave you with this week:

When you got promoted, what did you wish someone had handed you along with the title?

Lisa English, ACC, CMM is a Leadership and Executive Coach and Strategic Consultant with deep expertise in Events, Travel and Hospitality. The Weekly 1:1™ publishes every Tuesday at 8am PT. Subscribe at lisaenglishsg.substack.com or subscribe below.