The Promotion Nobody Rehearses
Most people become managers because they were good at something else. The Chartered Management Institute has a name for what follows: accidental managers, promoted because they are popular, good at their job, or simply available to take charge. CMI's October 2023 study with YouGov, Taking Responsibility: Why UK plc needs better managers, drew on more than 4,500 UK workers and managers. In the managers' half of it, a survey of 2,524 employees with management experience, 82% of those entering management positions had not had any formal management and leadership training.
The skills that earned the promotion do not carry across on their own. Linda A. Hill, who by 2007 had spent more than a decade studying how star performers move into management, argues in Becoming the Boss (Harvard Business Review, January 2007) that most new managers fail that first test of leadership because of common misconceptions about what it means to be in charge. She also notes that many are reluctant to ask their own bosses for help.
A first year in management is not a private experiment either. The team lives with every conversation their manager holds well, fumbles or avoids, which is why manager behaviour keeps surfacing in engagement data, as our page on employee engagement sets out. So the useful question for any new manager training is not whether the content is right. Most of it is. The question is where, before the real conversation, a new manager has ever tried to have it.
The Gap Between Knowing and Doing
Some things cannot be taught, they have to be felt, and managing people sits squarely in that category. The usual format is familiar: a delegation model on a slide, a feedback acronym in a workbook, a module to finish before the next cohort call. None of it is wrong, and it still leaves a new manager able to describe the conversation rather than hold it. The defaults are easy to picture: doing the work yourself instead of handing it over, or keeping the peace with people who were your peers a month ago. Why that gap survives good content is the subject of a separate piece, why manager training fails to change behaviour.
New Manager Training Topics: Six Fundamentals, Practised
Sidestream's manager programme runs over two days, in person. Professional actors play the other people in the room, so what a manager does next gets an answer rather than a nod. Colleagues playing each other rarely manage that, because they are sympathetic, distracted by their own turn, and have a working relationship to protect. More on the method in role-play training with professional actors.
Six fundamentals carry the content. Each one gets a short input, and each one then has to survive contact with an actor, which is the part that shows whether it was understood or only agreed with.
Two of them have their own depth on this site. Psychological safety is Amy Edmondson's term for a shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking, set out in what psychological safety is. Delegation is where many new managers stall, and our piece on the delegation gap looks at why it behaves like a reflex rather than a piece of knowledge.
- Managing yourself: noticing your own reaction before it starts running the conversation.
- Psychological safety: making it safe to be challenged, so people say what is actually going on.
- Prioritisation: deciding what will not get done, and telling the team so.
- Delegation: handing work over with an owner and a date, rather than quietly taking it back.
- Accountability: holding a standard without turning it into blame.
- Feedback and coaching: the part every other fundamental has to be delivered through.
How the Two Days Run
Each day pairs the short inputs with something longer. Professional actors play out a full scene with the pressure intact, and the group has to manage it live. Then it is taken apart and run again, with the action stopped at the exchanges that decided how it went, so they can be handled differently. The scenes are written and cast in advance, and which behaviours they put under pressure is agreed with the organisation before the days are built.
Day two closes with five shorter conversations, one to one, an actor as the direct report and the rest of the group watching and feeding back. Each takes around fifteen minutes: five playing it, five on the debrief, five rewinding to the moment that mattered and playing it again. The conversations are the ordinary ones, underperformance nobody has named, a disappointment the manager cannot fix, someone under strain who is still delivering. Ordinary is the point, because those are the ones that get postponed, and postponing is a decision too.
The replay matters more than it looks. The first attempt shows the default. The debrief makes the default visible. Only the second attempt shows whether the manager can do something else when the pressure comes back, and that is the version worth building on.
Discomfort is part of this, and it is not the aim. The design has to separate the discomfort of effort from the discomfort of being exposed in front of colleagues, which we cover in why role-play feels uncomfortable.
What the Research Says About Rehearsal for Managers
Behaviour modelling training, the family of methods built on seeing a behaviour, practising it and getting feedback, has a long evidence base. Taylor, Russ-Eft and Chan's meta-analytic review of 117 studies (Journal of Applied Psychology, 2005) found effects were largest on learning outcomes and smaller on job behaviour. It also found that declarative knowledge decayed over time while effects on skills and job behaviour held or even increased, and that skill development was greatest where the training time was longest.
The same review is candid about what happens outside the training room. Transfer to the job was greatest when both positive and negative examples were shown, when practice included scenarios the trainees generated themselves, when trainees were asked to set goals, when their own superiors were also trained, and when rewards and sanctions were built into the work environment. Rehearsal of this kind builds the skill in the room. Whether it then gets used depends partly on the manager's manager.
Leadership training in general performs better than its reputation. Lacerenza and colleagues' meta-analysis of 335 independent samples (Journal of Applied Psychology, 2017) found improvements in reactions, learning, transfer and results. Its moderator analyses supported needs analysis, feedback, multiple delivery methods and especially practice, spaced sessions, on-site delivery, and face-to-face delivery that is not self-administered.
Our own starting point is narrower. In a randomised study at UCL in 2020, co-founder Ben Laumann had 57 participants learn the same feedback model through rehearsal with a role-play coach, an instructional slideshow or an instructional video. Delivery was rated blind by two independent assessors. Rehearsal came out ahead, with a large effect against video (Cohen's d = 1.08) and a medium-to-large effect against slides (d = 0.75). It is a single study of one skill, and its practice condition was a 20-minute online role-play coaching session. It was not this programme, and we do not present it as a measurement of it.
How Progress Is Read: In Play, Not on a Form
The fundamentals are watched while people work, one manager at a time, rather than collected on a satisfaction form at the end. Did the manager notice their own reaction and slow down? Did they make it safe for the actor to push back? Did they leave with an owner and a date, or with an undertaking to keep an eye on things?
That choice comes out of the evidence. In the randomised UCL study behind our method, self-rated confidence rose in every condition, including the slideshow and video groups whose delivery was rated significantly weaker. Training can make a manager feel ready without making them ready, and a satisfaction form will not spot the difference.
Being straight about the limit matters too. Watching someone in the room shows what they can do under pressure. It does not yet show what they do at work on an ordinary Tuesday, which is Kirkpatrick Level 3 and a separate piece of measurement, set out in how to measure behaviour change and the Kirkpatrick model.
Who It Is For, and How It Sits Next to Our Other Training
The programme is run for people new to managing, including those promoted into their first management role, and the content is the groundwork of managing people that anyone new to the role needs before anything else. It is run in-house, for one organisation's own group of managers, rather than as an open course with dates and single places, and the material is agreed with that organisation first.
It is narrower than our leadership training in London, which is scoped for cohorts from team leaders to executive teams. It overlaps with coaching skills training, which goes deeper on the manager-as-coach conversation, and with conflict resolution training, which starts from disputes. This one puts the six fundamentals together inside the conversations a manager holds week by week.
Like all Sidestream work, it is priced per engagement rather than by a day rate, because the effort sits in the scenario design and the casting.
New Manager Training: In Short
On CMI's 2023 figures, most people entering management in the UK have had no formal management training, and the skills that earned the promotion do not carry across on their own. Sidestream's manager programme is two days, in person, with professional actors in the room. Six fundamentals get a short input each and are then put under pressure: longer scenes the group has to manage and replay, and five one-to-one conversations with an actor as the direct report, each one played, debriefed and played again. Progress is watched in the room, not claimed on a form. Get in touch today. We are Sidestream.
Frequently Asked Questions
What topics does new manager training cover?
Sidestream's programme is built around six fundamentals: managing yourself under pressure, psychological safety, prioritisation, delegation, accountability, and feedback and coaching. Each gets a short input, and each is then rehearsed with professional actors rather than tested on paper, because a manager who can describe delegation and a manager who can hand work over are not the same person.
How long is the programme, and how does it run?
Two days, in person. Each day pairs short inputs on the fundamentals with a longer scene that actors play out and the group has to manage, then replay. Day two closes with five shorter conversations, one to one, with an actor as the direct report. Each of those takes around fifteen minutes: five playing it, five on the debrief, and five rewinding to the moment that mattered and playing it again.
Is this an open course or an in-house programme?
In-house. We run it for one organisation's own managers, and the scenes are written and cast around the behaviours that organisation says matter most, agreed in a conversation before the days are built. There is no open course with published dates to book a single place on, and the work is priced per engagement.
Why do people struggle when they are first promoted into management?
Because the job changes and the preparation usually does not. CMI's 2023 study with YouGov found that 82% of those entering management positions had not had any formal management and leadership training, which is where its phrase accidental managers comes from. Linda A. Hill's work in Harvard Business Review adds the other half: most new managers fail the first test of leadership because of common misconceptions about what being in charge involves, and many are reluctant to ask their own bosses for help.
Is there evidence that this kind of management training works?
There is good evidence for the ingredients. Taylor, Russ-Eft and Chan's 2005 meta-analysis of 117 studies found that behaviour modelling effects on skills and job behaviour remained stable or increased over time, while declarative knowledge decayed. Lacerenza and colleagues' 2017 meta-analysis of 335 samples supported practice, feedback and face-to-face delivery in leadership training. Our own randomised UCL study from 2020 (n = 57) found rehearsal with a role-play coach produced better feedback delivery than slides or video, rated blind by two independent assessors. None of these studies measured this specific programme.
Sources: CMI with YouGov (2023), Taking Responsibility: Why UK plc needs better managers · Hill, L. A. (2007), Becoming the Boss, Harvard Business Review, January 2007 · Taylor, Russ-Eft and Chan (2005), meta-analytic review of behaviour modelling training, Journal of Applied Psychology 90(4) · Lacerenza, Reyes, Marlow, Joseph and Salas (2017), Leadership training design, delivery, and implementation: A meta-analysis, Journal of Applied Psychology 102(12)