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Accidental managers are everywhere, apparently. Even in EdTech!
Accidental managers. You may know some. You may be managed by one. You may even be one! You know the sort - those people that have been promoted into management and leadership positions with little or no leadership training or experience - and perhaps even without the desire to manage others. Apparently they’re everywhere - leaving a trail of employee disengagement and poor productivity in their wake.
A man(ager) walks into a bar. Ouch!
I don’t know who coined the term “accidental managers” but it amuses me. Like they and their organisation woke up one day and there they were, previously brilliant at their job and rewarded for it, ineptly trying to manage for the first time while wishing they could do some “actual” work. Nonetheless, I find myself using the term anyway because it’s a short cut that everyone I speak to in business seems to understand and have experience of.
They’re everywhere!
According to a 2023 Harvard Business Review article, in the UK, more than two thirds of managers categorise themselves as “accidental managers.”
I don’t have the stats but I’d bet the proportion is higher in industries where deep technical expertise is revered and rewarded, with EdTech being no exception, as a growth industry combining technological and pedagogical innovation. There are also many talented founders in EdTech whose brilliance got them to a place where they are now scaling up but where they are suddenly finding themselves, possibly reluctantly, managing both employees and wider stakeholders.
Technical specialists
In my own Executive MBA research on leadership development in the comparative technical area of the tax profession, those I interviewed (including FTSE 100 heads of tax) all said that, to be an effective leader, they had to transition from being a deep technical specialist to displaying a wider range of competencies. This included leading, assembling and motivating teams with diverse skill sets, and other attributes such as humility, authenticity, judgement, and resilience.
When asked about their recommendations for developing these skills, many of them said to me that part of their own leadership development had been learning how not to do it - through observing and working with poor role-models!
What’s the impact?
“When employees are engaged, they are more productive at work. They are absent less and produce more. They build better customer relationships and close more sales. So, what engages work teams the most? Their manager.”
Gallup State of the Global Workplace 2025 report
According to the Gallup State of the Global Workplace 2025 report, managers play a vital role in supporting wider employee engagement and productivity. Conversely, outside of their comfort zone and without support, accidental managers will likely have the opposite effect - becoming anxious, disengaged and ineffective, with a knock-on impact for the engagement of their teams.
So what should we do?
“By redefining the role, expectations and support of managers, leaders can create an environment where managers thrive — and when managers thrive, so do their teams.”
Gallup State of the Global Workplace 2025 report
So, rather than leaving this stuff to chance, allowing individuals to stumble, surprised and unprepared, into management roles, how about we create “deliberate managers”?
The Gallup report makes three key recommendations to address a decline in engagement:
It’s that simple!
Where to start?
If you’ve ever thought about the best boss you’ve ever worked for and reflected on what it was that they did that made them great, I’d be surprised if the following things weren’t on your list:
Effectively, they coached you!
Creating leaders-who-coach
“A leader-who-coaches is anyone, irrespective of hierarchical position, who embeds into their interaction with a colleague an intention to help that colleague solve their own professional dilemmas. It represents a state of mind in which one is facilitating the release of agency in another [and] takes place interwoven with the messiness of everyday leadership activities.”
Dr Phil Renshaw and Dr Jenny Robinson, 2023.
Creating leaders-who-coach isn’t about asking managers to become professional coaches, where time is ringfenced for coaching to happen independently. It’s about coaching being part of everyday leadership behaviour - during those day to day interactions in the workplace and drawing on a toolkit of behaviours such as:
It’s these behaviours, when used day to day, that fuel belonging, engagement, and productivity.
If you’re an accidental manager, want the accidental managers in your organisation to more positively impact team engagement and productivity, or want to create deliberate managers from the get go, then I invite you to embrace and foster the behaviours of leaders-who-coach. Talk to me about how you can make this happen through Coaching On the Go workshops and the accompanying book and behavioural analysis tool.
About the author:
Ruth Punter is a coach, consultant and facilitator and Coaching On the Go Co-Pilot working with teams, professionals and entrepreneurs to ignite and fire-up their personal, career, leadership and business goals. In her 25 year career in the Big 4 she was a consultant to multinational companies on workforce taxation. A speaker and facilitator on many technical and professional skills development courses for clients and colleagues, Ruth has developed and directed graduate and leadership courses in the UK and EMEA and designed and led career development programmes for professional membership organisations, including a series on thriving as a professional and returning to work. Ruth operates through R H Punter Ltd, a company registered in England & Wales at 34 Queens Road, Beckenham, BR3 4JW under Company Number 15344216.
Join Ruth at the upcoming webinar about Transforming your leadership in EdTech through coaching-on-the-go
