One through line of all the organisations I’ve worked for is ‘learning by experience’. Something that is even more prevalent when moving away from front-line roles and into management. I was not surprised to read that 82% of new managers had no training in how to manage (CMI), as I was one of them. At 17, I was managing a night shift team in retail during the COVID-19 pandemic, then into my next role where I was leading teams across multiple sites aged 19, all with no management training.
Unsurprisingly, gaining the trust of my team was incredibly difficult. Especially as they saw a teenager and university student who was clearly learning how to manage as he went along. I felt, on top of my actual inexperience, I had a perception problem so was determined to find a solution to both- two birds, one stone. I settled on external management training as I was hoping it would improve the quality of my managing as I got to grips with what it taught and, upon completion, formal accreditation would improve my professional image.
The first difference I noticed whilst mid-coursework was understanding why the business was making the decisions that it was; I’ve always been a numbers and technical solution person, so the aspects covered by the CMI came to me more quickly, even if that wasn’t my initial goal. Understanding the wider business made it easier to communicate with the team, particularly on change management. From that understanding, it was also easier to network internally, creating more of a professional reputation.
The first milestone was in the improvement in quality of one-to-one sessions, my first set of quarterly feedback meetings since properly engaging with the people management side of the CMI’s resources. I had been trying out a few bits from the training (letting colleagues do more of the talking in one to ones, as well as feedback models) and was trying to come to an end result that still felt like ‘my style’. We went through a few uneventful ones, not really any different from pre-training. Which typically involved having to deliberately keep momentum and draw answers out of people. But, at the third meeting it’s like I knew what the responses and challenges were going to be, and they were following the path laid out by the model. More than that, it wasn’t me fighting to keep it on track, it felt like my counterpart was equally, and unwittingly, reading from the same script; even when it came to improvements needed.
I was aware of how well it was going at the time and was torn. Was this the training, the time spent thinking and reflecting on why the previous ones felt as stilted as they did, or was it just luck? After all, I was completing around twenty one to ones a year, one going well by chance isn’t unthinkable. All that said over the next six months more and more of the meetings, both formal and ad hoc, started to go the same way becoming more satisfying and less work intensive, but still meaningful to both parties.
The lightbulb moment above was really the catalyst, I knew now that what I was learning did hold water in the real world, and proved its worth over the past few years in difficult and unexpected conversations; when you trust it, the training just takes over.
Tweaks, and new implementations, are still happening in my management practices. They always will as the role and people I work with change. The main changes in this initial phase of learning were to prepare properly with the facts and context needed, allow others to talk, and to emotionally engage with your team in one to ones, all whilst keeping to an agenda and remaining professional.
Following on from this, and bringing in other knowledge learnt along the way, I felt much more confident. I was now rarely dreading meetings with my team, or people in the wider business. As I became more confident and effective my professional reputation in the business grew. There came a point where I was still studying when the issue of others’ perception and first impressions of me resolved itself, based on what I had learned and changed through training, implementation, and refinement.
Staying within one business you get to cultivate your professional image and maintain it. By moving businesses, you lose the internal reputation you’ve built up. This is where I feel having the complete CMI qualifications came into its own. Again, I moved roles, now aged 21 and managing a well-established team some of whom had their reservations when they first heard the news about my appointment. But after searching through my LinkedIn and saw the qualifications and past roles, they felt more at ease, which they confirmed to me.
Daniel Chapman, June 2025