Why a quarter of managers just got promoted, but never wanted that job.
Companies still promote people into management as a reward for good individual work, then act surprised when those people resent the role. Gartner’s numbers suggest the problem starts long before.
Hello there, it’s Giuseppe here. Welcome to a new post from the Better Leadership newsletter.
You might have heard from friends working at other organizations, or lived it yourself, the case where someone tells you their organization has a management problem.
Few people will admit that a good chunk of that problem is self-inflicted, at least by who’s in charge of promoting people: they keep putting people into management roles who never wanted to manage anyone.
In this article, we’ll see how numbers back this up.
In an April 2024 Gartner survey of 162 HR leaders, only 35% were satisfied with the effectiveness of their mid-level managers, and just 27% with their frontline managers.
Employees feel it too. A July 2024 Gartner survey of 3529 employees found that only 38% were satisfied with the quality of their manager, and barely half said they trust the person they report to.
I’ve lived this first hand in quite some cases to know what usually follows data like this: a new training program, a new competency model, sometimes a redesigned review cycle. What rarely gets questioned is who gets selected for the role in the first place.
Interestingly, a May 2025 survey of 3000 employees found that one in four managers would rather not be managing people at all, up from one in five just two years earlier. Nearly 80% of HR leaders, in a separate July 2025 survey of 900 of them, admitted their managers are overwhelmed by how much the job now covers, and that’s before factoring in how quickly AI is reshaping what management means day to day.
When a manager doesn’t want the job, it shows. They lack real commitment to the work, and that gap between title and intent tends to surface exactly where it hurts most.
A May 2024 Gartner survey of 985 senior leaders and mid-level managers found that highly engaged managers are nearly 4x more likely to be high contributors, more than 2x as likely to want to stay, and 3x more likely to put in discretionary effort compared to their less engaged peers. Reluctance isn’t a minor personality quirk. It shows up in retention, output, and how a team feels day to day.
Then why selection keeps getting this wrong?
Part of the answer is that most management-selection processes are built to look backward, not forward. In a March 2023 Gartner survey of 98 HR leaders, 79% said consistent high individual performance was a top factor in choosing new managers. Only 22% gave real weight to pre-management assessments designed to test whether someone actually wants, or is suited to, the job.
I, and probably everyone, understands the logic. Rewarding your best performer with a promotion feels fair, and it’s an easy story to tell the rest of the team. The problem is that being excellent at a job and wanting to manage the people doing that job are two different things, and companies routinely treat them as the same thing.
Less than a third of managers, according to Gartner, ever got exposure to simulations, mentorship, or any real chance to test whether management suited them before they were dropped into the role.
HR leaders are aware this isn’t working. In a July 2025 Gartner survey of 114 of them, only 16% said their organization’s selection process reliably puts the right people into management roles. Fixing that means doing two things at once:
keeping reluctant managers from being installed in the first place
helping the ones already in the role who are struggling with it.
Catching reluctance before the promotion.
If a quarter of managers would rather not manage, HR’s job is to find that group before they’re offered the role, so that saying yes to management is an actual decision rather than something that happens to someone.
One way to do this is to show candidates the ugliest parts of the job before they take it. Let them sit in on a difficult performance conversation. Have them work through a real prioritization decision under time pressure. Put them through a calibration session where they have to defend a rating in front of peers.
This does two things:
It prepares people for what the job actually involves, instead of the flattering version they imagine from the outside.
It gives them a real basis for deciding whether to keep going, rather than finding out six months into the role that they hate it.
Pairing interested candidates with managers who are new enough to remember what the transition felt like helps too. Only 26% of managers, in a June 2025 Gartner survey of 3002 employees, said they had this kind of honest mentorship before stepping into the role. That could be a low bar to clear, and it matters, because a recently promoted manager is often a more honest source than a polished leadership program.
It also helps to build real off-ramps into the selection process. When people can step back from a management track without it reading as failure, fewer of them push forward out of obligation or fear of how it will look. That alone reduces how many reluctant managers end up in the role.
Working with the managers already there.
Not every case of reluctance looks the same, and treating them all the same way would be a mistake. Once HR has identified a manager who seems reluctant, the real question is whether that reluctance can shift, or whether it’s closer to permanent.
The distinction usually comes down to what’s driving the resistance.
A manager overwhelmed by the volume of work is in a different position than one who dislikes the actual type of work involved in managing people.
Someone frustrated by a temporary rough patch is different from someone frustrated by something structural to the role.
Lacking confidence in a few specific tasks reads differently than an aversion to core parts of the job, like difficult conversations.
Finding parts of the work dull is not the same as finding them unbearable. The first item in each pair is usually addressable. The second usually isn’t.
When reluctance is entrenched, coaching rarely moves things much, and I’d stop pretending otherwise past a certain point. The more honest path is connecting that manager with talent acquisition to look for a better-fitting role elsewhere in the company. If nothing turns up, separation sometimes becomes the only responsible option.
When reluctance is addressable, there’s more room to work with. If the issue is confidence, one approach I like is looking at what the person already does well outside of work and drawing the line back to management. Someone who’s spent years coordinating a group of stubborn volunteers has already practiced managing difficult personalities. Someone who’s had hard conversations with an aging parent about care has already practiced the kind of conversation that terrifies most new managers. That experience counts, even if nobody’s ever framed it that way for them.
If the issue is feeling overwhelmed, small habits tend to help more than a big training rollout. Teaching a manager to block off set times for email, or to use the two-minute rule for quick tasks, cuts down on interruptions without asking much of someone who’s already stretched thin. Turning off notifications helps too, mostly because it becomes a habit rather than a rule they have to remember to follow. Once a habit sets in, the manager stops having to think about it, and that alone lowers the weight of the job.
Good teams are usually run by managers who chose the role, even imperfectly, rather than ones who ended up there by default. Getting that right starts earlier than most companies think, well before the offer letter, in the conversations nobody has yet about whether someone actually wants this.
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Until next time, have a wonderful day or evening, and see you in the next post!