This article forms part of No Shortcuts, IMI’s series exploring the capabilities organisations increasingly depend on, but which cannot be developed through information alone. Here, Eva Perez, Programme Director for IMI’s Professional Diploma in Management, examines what separates knowing how management should work from developing the judgement to manage well in practice.
Early in her career, Eva Perez made a mistake familiar to many new managers.
She had been promoted because she was good at what she did. Very good, in fact. So when someone on her team was taking longer than she would have taken to complete a task, the solution seemed obvious.
“I would think to myself, ‘It would be quicker if I do it myself,’” she recalls.
Often, she was right. The work certainly got done faster. But she now believes “that’s the biggest mistake I’ve ever made.”
Every time Perez stepped in, she was taking work back from the team and adding to her own. More importantly, she was avoiding the management questions she should have been confronting.
Why was the person struggling? Was the expectation clear? Did they have the skills, resources and training to do work well?
“If you keep thinking, ‘I’ll do it myself because it’s quicker,’ you have a problem with your team,” she says. “Then you’re going to be burnt out. And the team works even less effectively.”
Many managers arrive there because they have been successful specialists. They know the work and solve problems quickly and have built credibility as the person other people come to for answers.
Then they step into management.
It’s a transition that is often surprisingly under-supported. CIPD notes that people skills are not always considered when someone is promoted into management, with managers frequently left to learn the role on the job.
Perez, Programme Director for IMI’s Professional Diploma in Management, sees this all too often. Participants come from very different sectors and functions, but they usually tell some version of the same story: they became very good at their discipline and then, almost by accident, “fell into management.”
Suddenly they are responsible for other people’s performance as well as their own.
“What happens then is that managing a team is very different than doing what you do quite well within your role,” she says.
A new manager’s initial instinct is often to preserve the behaviour that made them successful. For example, people bring problems, and the manager supplies answers. If people are slow, the manager intervenes. Someone is struggling; the manager takes greater control.
And so on.
But the capabilities required of a good specialist and a good manager are not the same.
“I think one of the things about being a good manager is realising you don’t have to have all the answers all the time,” Perez says. “Good managers ask good questions.”
A good question can simply be: what do you think we should do?
For someone accustomed to being valued for their expertise, this can be deeply uncomfortable.
Management has a control problem
According to Perez, one of the biggest misconceptions about management is that its purpose is control: not only controlling people but monitoring work and ensuring tasks are complete.
“For me, good management is about creating the conditions in which people can perform well,” says Perez.
This includes clarity around expectations but also ensuring people have the capabilities and resources to deliver, along with creating enough trust and autonomy for people to make decisions themselves. Gallup research attributes 70 per cent of the variance in team engagement to the manager, while linking stronger engagement with outcomes including productivity, retention and profitability.
This does not mean stepping in and fixing things.
Control can provide immediate evidence of managerial activity, but creating the conditions for performance requires a different kind of attention. The manager has to understand why performance is falling in the first place.
Unfortunately, organisations frequently mistake a wider system problem for a people problem.
Perez recalls working with a manager in a large public-sector organisation whose team was under significant pressure. Internal communications moved through multiple departments before the team received the information it needed to resolve cases, leading to serious delays and overall customer service deterioration.
The conclusion from above was predictable: the team needed to perform faster.
But the team wasn’t the constraint.
“There was no bad people performance,” Perez says. “The problem was the process.”
Applying more pressure to the team wouldn’t have removed a single handover or shortened the information flow or fixed the underlying bureaucracy; it would have simply put more pressure on already stretched people operating inside a system they could not control or change.
Poor management is often imagined as an interpersonal failure: a difficult boss or weak communication or insufficient empathy. While these failures certainly exist – and CIPD research has found a direct relationship between the quality of people management employees experience and their performance, health and wellbeing – managers also sit at a point where strategy meets the organisation as it actually operates. They see the competing priorities and the broken processes and the unclear decision rights and the practical consequences of decisions made elsewhere.
A genuinely capable manager therefore needs to ask much more than “How do I get this person to perform better?” Instead, they should ask, “What is preventing this person from performing well?”
The difference between those questions is judgement.
Knowing the framework is the easy part
Management has no shortage of models.
Every business school and consultancy has frameworks for feedback and conflict and motivation and difficult conversations and delegation and change and performance and almost every other problem likely to land on a manager’s desk.
In fact, Perez teaches many of them herself.
“The concepts and the frameworks can be learned quite quickly,” she says.
However, people and organisations refuse to behave like textbook examples.
A framework for a performance conversation works until the manager sits opposite someone they have known for ten years and that person becomes emotional, or reveals information that changes the manager’s understanding of what has happened.
“All of a sudden, the framework doesn’t work as well as you thought,” says Perez.
This is where judgement takes over. A high-performing manager, in her view, understands the frameworks but can adapt them to different circumstances and different people.
As consistent with the theme of this series, judgement is difficult to shortcut.
“It comes with making decisions, seeing the consequences, receiving feedback, reflecting and then encountering situations that are very similar but never identical,” says Perez.
Managers can be given knowledge and exposed to other people’s experiences, but judgement is developed through “experience, application, feedback and learning.”
Thus why the idea of the manager as the person with the answer becomes increasingly inadequate as responsibility grows.
Being good with people matters enormously, says Perez, but “being good with people is not enough.”
Managers also need sufficient breadth to understand how organisations work—finance, people, strategy, culture, performance, operations—and the judgement to make decisions when “sometimes there isn’t an answer.”
Experience does not eliminate the need to learn
One of Perez’s favourite examples is a participant who arrived on the Diploma in Management after 40 years as a managing director.
While the obvious question was what someone with four decades of experience could possibly still need to learn, this MD’s question was different:
“How can I do what I do better?”
Organisations change. Expectations of managers change. The problems managers encounter change. Experience can build judgement, but experience alone does not guarantee that someone continues to examine how they manage.
Through the diploma, Perez sees the same willingness to learn at the other end of the spectrum: ambitious specialists deliberately building a wider understanding of finance, human resources, organisational behaviour, leadership and culture before their first substantial management role.
That mix is part of the value. Managers from different functions, sectors and levels of experience bring situations that no individual could encounter in one career. Hearing how somebody in another organisation handled a difficult conversation or diagnosed a seemingly familiar problem expands the repertoire available when a manager later confronts something similar.
This doesn’t produce a ready-made answer, of course. Nor should it.
But it gives a manager more to draw on when deciding what this particular situation requires.
Management has sometimes become the less glamorous sibling of leadership. Leadership gets associated with vision, transformation, purpose and inspiration; management with meetings, budgets, KPIs and bureaucracy.
Perez thinks that distinction has done management a disservice.
“You can have an inspiring vision and an excellent strategy, but you need somebody to translate that into reality,” she says. “That’s what management is.”
Doing more than efficient administration or interpersonal skills. Instead it requires managers who can resist the urge to control every outcome, create the conditions in which other people can perform and make sound judgements when the framework stops providing the answer.
The transition from specialist to manager therefore involves a change in what expertise looks like.
You may have reached management because you were exceptionally good at answering questions, but becoming a good manager may depend on learning which ones you should no longer answer yourself.
There are no shortcuts to developing that judgement. It is built through experience, application, challenge, feedback and reflection — and through remaining willing, however experienced the manager becomes, to ask the question Perez heard from a managing director after 40 years in the role:
“How can I do what I do better?”
