The Real Reason Your Managers Are Struggling (It's Not What You Think)

There is a conversation that happens, with minor variations, in almost every organisation we work with in Singapore. It usually starts with a frustrated CEO, a concerned HR Director, or a board that has noticed something is wrong. And it almost always sounds like this: "Our managers just are not cutting it."

The symptoms vary. Teams missing targets. High performers leaving. Projects stalling at the handoff between strategy and execution. Decisions escalating upward that should have been made two levels down. A culture of caution where people wait to be told rather than stepping up.

The diagnosis that follows is almost always the same: the managers need training. And so the organisation invests in a leadership programme, a series of workshops, maybe some coaching. And six months later, the same conversation happens again.

What is going wrong? In our experience, almost everything — except the managers themselves.

The promoted-without-preparation problem

The most common root cause of manager underperformance is not attitude, motivation, or capability. It is that the person was promoted into a management role before they had any real preparation for what that role actually requires.

Across Singapore and the region, organisations routinely promote their best individual contributors into management positions. The logic seems reasonable: they are high performers, they know the work, people respect them. What could go wrong?

What goes wrong is that being a great individual contributor and being a great manager require fundamentally different skills. Individual contributors succeed by doing excellent work themselves. Managers succeed by getting excellent work out of others. These are not the same thing, and being good at one does not make you good at the other.

The promoted-without-preparation manager is dropped into a role that requires entirely new skills — having difficult performance conversations, delegating without micromanaging, developing team members, building alignment across functions — and expected to figure it all out while also delivering results. Most do not figure it out. Not because they are not capable, but because nobody taught them.

The wrong diagnosis leads to the wrong treatment

When organisations notice that managers are underperforming, the instinctive response is to send them on a training course. This is understandable, but it misdiagnoses the problem.

Training courses build knowledge and awareness. They can be genuinely valuable — but they account for only a small fraction of how leadership capability actually develops. Research consistently shows that around 70% of leadership development happens through on-the-job experience, 20% through relationships and feedback, and just 10% through formal learning.

This means that a two-day workshop on leadership skills, while potentially useful, cannot close the gap that opened up when a manager was promoted without preparation. The gap is not about knowledge. It is about practice, feedback, and the gradual development of judgement through real experience.

Sending struggling managers on training is the equivalent of teaching someone to swim by reading a book about swimming. The book might help. But until they get in the water, with someone there to coach them, they are not going to learn to swim.

What managers actually need

Based on what we see working across Singapore organisations, managers who genuinely develop tend to share a few things in common. They have clear expectations — not just targets, but an understanding of what good management actually looks like in their organisation. They have regular, honest feedback on how they are doing. They have access to someone — a coach, a mentor, a skilled senior leader — who helps them navigate challenges in real time. And they are held accountable for developing their teams, not just delivering results.

What managers rarely have: all of the above, consistently, over time. Most get some version of some of these things, some of the time. But genuine, sustained development is the exception rather than the rule.

See how SEED Academy builds manager effectiveness programmes designed around real experience, not just workshops →

The organisational conditions that make managers struggle

Beyond individual preparation and development, managers also struggle when organisational conditions work against them. These are worth naming directly.

Too many direct reports. Effective people management takes time. A manager with twelve or fifteen direct reports cannot give each of them the attention they need to grow and perform. But in lean organisations trying to do more with less, this is common.

Unclear expectations from above. When managers do not know what success looks like in their role — because the organisation has not defined it clearly — they default to doing what they know: the technical work they were good at before they were promoted. This is sometimes called “playing the role you came from,” and it is one of the most common patterns we see.

No safety to try and fail. Good management requires trying things, getting them wrong, learning, and adjusting. In cultures where managers are expected to have all the answers and errors are treated as failures rather than learning opportunities, this process cannot happen. Managers become risk-averse and conservative, which compounds the performance problem.

Senior leaders who do not develop their people. If the leader above a manager does not prioritise developing their team, does not give regular feedback, and does not model good management themselves, the manager below them has a very limited example to learn from and very little support to grow.

The cost of the wrong diagnosis

When organisations misdiagnose manager underperformance — attributing it to the manager rather than the conditions — the solutions they reach for are usually ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst.

Ineffective: sending managers on training programmes that teach them skills they cannot apply because the structural conditions that caused the problem have not changed.

Counterproductive: labelling managers as poor performers and managing them out, then replacing them with new managers who face the same conditions and develop the same problems. This cycle is more common than most organisations would like to admit.

The real cost is not just the performance gap. It is the talent that leaves because their manager was not supported to develop them. It is the culture that calcifies around caution and compliance. It is the leadership pipeline that never fills because high potentials are watching how managers are treated and deciding they do not want the job.

What the right diagnosis looks like

Before investing in any manager development programme, the most useful question an HR Director or People leader can ask is: why are our managers struggling? Not "are they struggling?" — most already know the answer to that. But why.

Were they promoted into their roles with adequate preparation? Do they have clear expectations of what good management looks like in this organisation? Are they receiving regular, honest, useful feedback? Do their own leaders invest in developing them? Are the structural conditions — span of control, time available, culture of psychological safety — enabling or undermining their ability to manage well?

The answers to these questions determine what the right intervention actually is. Sometimes it is development — but development designed around real stretch, coaching, and accountability, not a two-day workshop. Sometimes it is structural change. Sometimes it is clarifying expectations. Often it is all of the above.

How SEED Academy approaches this

At SEED Academy, we do not start with a training programme. We start with the diagnosis. When we work with organisations on manager effectiveness, the first questions we ask are about the conditions — the structural, cultural, and systemic factors that are either enabling or undermining the managers in that organisation.

Only once we understand the conditions do we design the development. And that development is almost always built around real work — real challenges the managers are facing, real feedback from real stakeholders, real accountability for real outcomes. We bring in formal learning as a complement to experience, not a substitute for it.

This approach is slower than running a workshop and more demanding than sending managers on an external programme. It also works. Not because we have a better curriculum, but because we are solving the right problem.

If your organisation is facing manager underperformance and you are not sure whether the diagnosis is right, we would welcome the conversation. Explore our manager effectiveness services or get in touch with a SEED Academy consultant — we will help you understand the problem before recommending a solution.