The Role and Responsibility of a New Manager

New Managers are Struggling — The Role and Responsibility of a New Manager
Do your frontline managers fully understand what their role entails? Across organizations, senior executives and peers alike are expressing frustration with the performance of newly promoted managers.

Research from CEB highlights a stark reality: 60% of new managers underperform during their first two years. Even more concerning, 85% of these new managers receive no formal new manager training before stepping into leadership positions. The result is a leadership gap that directly affects team performance, engagement, and organizational outcomes.

The Role and Responsibility of a New Manager in 5 Stages
New managers must adopt a situational approach to leadership — balancing leading, planning, organizing, and controlling in ways that address the needs of diverse, and often misaligned, stakeholders. Think of a manager’s role as unfolding across five critical stages, each reinforced in our new manager training program:

1. Planning
   Defining a clear strategic direction and a common course of action. Our organizational alignment research found that strategic clarity accounts for 31% of the difference between high and low performing teams.  Management planning includes manager skills related to forecasting, developing objectives and strategies, tasking, scheduling, budgeting, and developing policies, procedures, and processes.  Without clear and agreed-upon team goals and accountabilities, it is difficult to set your team up for success.
2. Organizing
   Once your goals are clear, it is time to define clear roles, responsibilities, scope, and interdependencies for everyone on your team.  Management organizing includes manager skills related to effectively defining, grouping, assigning, and integrating work so that people can perform it in a way that makes sense for the team’s current skills and desires.
3. Staffing
   Once goals and roles are clear, effective new managers can attract, develop, engage, and retain the top talent required to best execute their plans in a way that makes sense for their unique strategy and culture.  In high growth companies, managers often spend more than 50 percent of their time recruiting, interviewing, and onboarding new team members.
4. Directing
   Effective new managers are decisive. They know how to influence people to take effective action through the new manager skills of influencing, motivating, decision-making, problem-solving, communicating, and politicking.
5. Controlling
   Effective new supervisors hold their teams accountable. They know how to assess and regulate work-in-progress, develop common standards, define team norms, and measure performance.

The Challenge for New Managers Today
The challenge for new managers goes beyond mastering the five stages of their role. They must expand their thinking, becoming agile and adaptable enough to meet the evolving demands of the modern workplace.  To succeed, new managers must embrace their role as facilitators rather than traditional bosses — leaders who empower their teams instead of directing them.

Our people manager assessment center shows that successful new managers also consistently demonstrate the ability to:

• Foster learning opportunities that go beyond simple knowledge accumulation
• Encourage employees to think independently rather than rely on “the way it’s always been done”
• Cultivate an environment where new ideas and approaches are welcomed and thoughtfully considered
• Continuously discover better ways to learn, grow, and improve
• Maintain a clear focus on customer needs, competitive pressures, and marketplace trends

Managers who develop these capabilities lead more effectively while building teams that are resilient, innovative, and prepared for whatever comes next.

The Bottom Line
The role of a manager is shifting — from traditional authority figure to entrepreneurial leader: someone who drives team growth, fosters innovation, and embraces continuous improvement. The real question is: are your new managers ready to meet this challenge?

To learn more about the role and responsibility of a new manager, download 7 Immediate Management Actions to Create Alignment with Goals