I’ve watched this happen dozens of times: a business owner promotes their best salesperson, their sharpest engineer, or their most reliable operations person into a management role. Then, within a year, that person is either burned out, their old team is falling apart, or both.

It’s an understandable instinct. When someone consistently outperforms everyone around them, promoting them feels like the obvious reward. The problem is that the skills that got them promoted aren’t the ones the new job actually requires.

That gap is showing up in the data. A growing wave of what experts now call “ accidental managers ” — people placed into leadership roles they never asked for and aren’t equipped to handle — is souring teams and sinking morale across industries. One U.K. study from the Chartered Management Institute found that 82% of workers entering management positions had received no formal leadership training at all, and the pattern holds in the U.S. and beyond.

If you’re a small or mid-sized business owner who has promoted, or is about to promote, an individual contributor into management, here’s what I’ve learned about closing that gap before it costs you your best people:

1. Test readiness before you promote

Most promotion decisions happen in a single conversation — a performance review, a resignation from someone else on the team, a budget opening up — with almost no time spent asking whether the person actually wants to lead. Gloria St. Martin-Lowry , president of HPWP, a consulting firm that helps organizations build high-performance cultures by promoting trust, respect, and employee engagement, frames the problem this way: “We tend to promote people because they’re really good at doing the work, and then we suddenly expect them to magically know how to lead the people doing the work. Those are two entirely different capabilities.”

I take that seriously before I promote anyone into a leadership role. Instead of assuming someone will be a good manager because they’re a good performer, I give them a low-stakes way to find out first, like running a small project or mentoring someone newer to the team. It surfaces something important: Does this person enjoy developing others, or do they just enjoy hitting their own numbers?

2. Train for the specific behaviors that make people quit

A recent BambooHR study found that 90% of employees who quit say their boss influenced the decision, and 58% point to their manager’s overall style (things like micromanaging or inconsistency) as the primary reason for leaving. Poor communication and a lack of constructive feedback were also common factors, cited by over a third of respondents each.

That’s a useful map. Instead of enrolling new managers in a broad leadership curriculum, I focus on the specific behaviors tied directly to why people leave: giving employees real autonomy instead of hovering over their work, delivering feedback that lands as support rather than criticism, and running a one-on-one that’s an actual conversation instead of a status update. Train for those things specifically, and you address the reasons people actually walk out the door.

3. Give new managers a support system, not just a title

The last piece is the one most companies skip entirely: what happens after the promotion is announced. Too often, a new manager gets a new title, a congratulatory email, and nothing else. And then they’re expected to figure the rest out alone.

That silence is costly. SHRM research found that 60% of new managers fail within their first 24 months, and nearly half say they’re likely to quit within a year because of work-related stress. I pair every new manager with either a small peer cohort of other first-time managers, or a structured 90-day check-in with their own manager, so problems surface in month one instead of month six.

Your best performer deserves better than a title

I’ve watched too many businesses lose great individual performers because they turned them into managers without ever teaching them how to lead. The instinct makes sense, but rewarding a high performer with a job they haven’t been prepared for isn’t a reward. It’s a setup.

The good news is, closing that gap doesn’t take much. It just requires treating the promotion as the start of someone’s development, not the finish line.

If you’re about to promote your best performer, pause before you make it official. Ask yourself whether you’re setting them up to lead, or just handing them a new job title and hoping they figure out the rest.