Let me tell you a story. It’s 2005, and I’m a young hospital corpsman in the Navy. I’m going through Field Medical Service School, the course that qualifies a corpsman to deploy with the Marines. And I’m the highest ranking E3 in the class, so they put me in charge of the other E3s.
And they aren’t listening to me. So I do the only thing I know how to do. I look at them and I say, “You need to listen to me. I am the highest ranking guy here.”
It doesn’t work. They don’t respect me, and pulling rank doesn’t change that. I was leading the way I had been led. And I learned fast that a title doesn’t make anybody follow you.
Most managers get the job the same way
Now think about how most managers get the job. They were the best at the work. They sold the most, or they fixed the most, or they closed the most. So somebody handed them a team.
And the data backs that up. In 2026, the American Management Association surveyed more than a thousand professionals around the world. Fifty-one percent of them were promoted into managing people without any formal leadership training. In the UK, the Chartered Management Institute found that 82 percent of people who step into management have had no formal management or leadership training at all. They call them accidental managers.
So I don’t blame the new manager. They were handed a team and told to go figure it out. And then everybody acts surprised when the hard moments go sideways.
Leading is a different skill
Sales is a skill. Recruiting is a skill. And leadership is a skill too, and you have to keep developing it.
I watch companies get very good at teaching people how to sell. Their teams grow, and their revenue grows. And then a big leadership gap grows right alongside it.
So what does a manager do when nobody trained them to lead? Some of them lead the way they were led. Some of them pull rank, like I did. And some of them just keep doing the work themselves, because the work is what they know.
And the team is watching all of it. Your team does half of what you do right and twice of what you do wrong. If the manager is late, the team is going to be late. If the manager avoids a hard conversation, the team learns that hard conversations are optional.
Time always promotes or exposes a leader.
What it costs
I worked alongside a guy who was a very competent salesman and a great recruiter. He could get a new person producing fast. And then about six months in, I started watching his best people quit.
So I went to one of them and asked him why. He was making great money. And his answer said everything to me. He said, “No amount of money in the world would make me want to work for a guy who talks to me the way he talks, who belittles me, who doesn’t make me feel valued, seen, respected or heard.”
Time always promotes or exposes a leader. That manager could attract talent, and he couldn’t keep it. Time exposed him.
Develop the people who lead your people
John Maxwell calls it the law of the lid. An organization can never outgrow the leadership inside it. Whatever the leaders are, that’s the ceiling for everybody underneath them.
So the fastest way to change what a hundred people experience at work every day is to develop the twelve who lead them. Your managers are the leverage point.
That’s who Lead Elite Academy is built for. It’s fifty-two weeks of deliberate development for the people who lead your people. And it starts with the skill nobody handed them on the day they got the title.
