One evening, you celebrate the promotion with family and friends, the next day, you sit down at your desk, realizing the job you actually liked and were good at doesn’t exist anymore. On top of that, you actually have very little idea how to do your new job.
I came to management after years of researching leadership, so I thought I knew what I was walking into. I was expecting the lack of clarity, long meetings, constant problem-solving, and decision-making.
I assumed the people on my team would think and communicate the way I did. That they’d prioritize what I’d prioritize, ask the questions I would, and need what I needed. They didn’t. It wasn’t until I internalized this that I was able to truly step into the management role.
“In my experience, 90% of startup failures aren’t product or market; it’s people management and the inability to grow the team beyond 20 people.”
Promotion is, in a way, an ode to meritocracy. When someone consistently delivers, promoting them to manager looks like the best choice. Sometimes it is, but there is a trap in this logic: being the best at your job doesn’t prepare you for a job that’s completely different. Yet I’ve seen countless companies behave as it does.
Investors watch this play out constantly because scaling makes it impossible to ignore. Miloš Lukačka, Managing Director at Praegon Capital, puts it bluntly: “In my experience, 90% of startup failures aren’t product or market; it’s people management and the inability to grow the team beyond 20 people.”
Don’t take this number as a statistic, but the underlying pattern holds: at some point, the problem stops being “do we have good people” and starts being “does anyone know where we’re going and what good actually looks like.”
In order to scale, managers must do what they are supposed to: define problems, create and maintain clarity, and do so while developing their teams and owning people dynamics. Very few companies have ways to prepare their people for this.
The mistake that looks like a reward
Ondřej Machek, CTO and co-founder of Smartlook, describes his transition the way many do: gradual, organic, almost accidental. He started as an individual contributor who was hired to solve a specific technical problem, and slowly found himself caring too much about how everything fits together to stay hands-off.
I always had a tendency to stick my nose into other things, and both organizations somehow let me do that. It gradually formalized until I realized I was no longer writing the code, and instead I was making sure the people around me were working toward the goal.”
This pattern is especially sharp in high-expertise fields such as engineering, law, or science, where the work itself is the point. The satisfaction of solving a hard problem, of getting something technically right, is real and specific. Managing other people’s work toward a business outcome is a different kind of satisfaction entirely. Some people discover they prefer it. Many find they miss what they gave up.
Michal Kopriva, Head of Sales at Malcom Finance, describes what falls apart when the transition isn’t handled well:
“The manager has great talent, super execution, but can’t transfer it to the team through the right leadership. They get too focused on the business, on the expertise they‘ve always done. They can‘t dedicate 40–50% of their time to the team, invest in them. Or they can’t communicate it right, can’t set expectations, and then there’s confusion, and nobody knows what’s going on.”
And that is exactly what happens when management fails. Because confusion is rarely about intelligence. It’s about missing alignment with the role itself.
The rhythm nobody warns you about
There’s another reason the switch is hard, and it’s almost never discussed in promotion conversations. Individual contribution has a short loop: a problem, effort, a finish line. You ship something, it works, you move on.
Management doesn’t work like that. Machek describes thus: “Basically, an endless cascade of problems. You’re always solving something, and there isn’t really an end.”
Some people thrive on this, but many don’t. Pretending the transition is purely upward — more status, same job, just bigger scope — sets people up to feel like they’re failing when really they just weren’t told what they signed up for.
Machek also describes what happened when Smartlook was preparing to scale from 15 to 50 people after a VC round: it was then that the first form of formal support arrived, in the form of a coach.
“In the initial phase, absolutely nothing. It was completely natural, organic, no formal input from anyone. That coaching came later, provided by our VC. And what it helped with most was learning to handle things with more distance, to stop reacting so fast and so emotionally, to not cause damage by just going in too hard.”
I can attest to this: when I stepped into a management role, I worked with a leadership coach, and what surprised me wasn’t how much there was to learn, but how much the role amplified things I already knew about myself. The tension I kept returning to was the one between enabling and assigning: when to clear the path for someone, and when to hand them the problem and trust they’d find their way.
Getting that wrong in one direction creates dependency. Getting it wrong in the other creates abandonment. The coaching didn’t resolve the tension; it just helped me notice when I was falling into it.
What “getting people ready” actually looks like
Not everyone needs a leadership coach or a leadership program. You need to treat management as a job change and say so before the promotion, not when you are already dealing with the outcomes of bad management.
Talk to your new manager openly and make the role concrete. Not “lead the team.” That’s too vague. Is it coaching? Hiring? Having hard performance conversations? Say exactly what you expect. Give them a decision-making perimeter, defining what they can decide without escalating. If the answer is “almost nothing,” you haven’t actually extended leadership to them.
And be honest about fit. As Machek puts it: “There are people who should be individual contributors their whole lives, and that doesn’t mean they couldn’t try management. The individual contributor track is completely ok, and for many people it’s actually the right path.”
I agree that not everyone has the capacity to become a strong manager, but I believe that companies shouldn’t create weak ones by not providing them with what they need to succeed. The first step toward this is to acknowledge what promotion actually is: a new job, not a bigger version of the old one.
