Articles / Leadership Training Topics for New Managers: Essential Curriculum
Development, Training & CoachingDiscover essential leadership training topics for new managers. Build the curriculum that transforms individual contributors into effective people leaders.
Written by Laura Bouttell • Fri 5th December 2025
Leadership training topics for new managers should address the specific challenges of transitioning from individual contributor to people leader. Research indicates that almost 60% of first-time managers receive no training when they move into management roles, creating what experts call "accidental managers" who must learn through trial and error—often at their teams' expense. The right training topics accelerate this transition, building capabilities that experience alone takes years to develop.
The priority should be foundational skills rather than advanced leadership concepts. New managers don't need strategic visioning or organisational transformation—they need to know how to have difficult conversations, delegate effectively, and manage their time alongside team responsibilities. Understanding which topics matter most helps organisations build training programmes that actually prepare new managers for success.
New manager training should cover topics that address the immediate challenges of leading people for the first time:
1. Delegation and Work Assignment
The shift from doing work to distributing work proves difficult for many new managers. Training should cover how to match tasks to capabilities, provide appropriate autonomy, maintain accountability without micromanaging, and develop people through thoughtful assignment.
2. Feedback and Difficult Conversations
New managers often avoid feedback because they don't know how to deliver it constructively. Training should cover giving both positive and developmental feedback, having performance conversations, addressing underperformance, and managing emotionally charged discussions.
3. Time Management and Prioritisation
Managing others while maintaining individual responsibilities overwhelms new managers. Training should address setting priorities, managing competing demands, protecting focus time, and balancing team needs with personal productivity.
4. Communication and Expectations
Clear communication prevents problems that unclear communication creates. Training should cover setting expectations, running effective meetings, communicating decisions, and ensuring understanding rather than assuming it.
5. Performance Management
New managers inherit or build performance management responsibilities. Training should cover goal-setting, progress monitoring, formal review processes, and documentation requirements.
| Topic Priority | Why It Matters | Typical Challenges |
|---|---|---|
| Delegation | Foundation of management | Fear of losing control |
| Feedback | Enables development | Avoidance and discomfort |
| Time management | Prevents overwhelm | Everything feels urgent |
| Communication | Prevents confusion | Assumptions about clarity |
| Performance management | Drives accountability | Inconsistency and avoidance |
Topic sequencing affects learning effectiveness:
Immediate priorities (first weeks):
Early development (first months):
Building capability (ongoing):
Delegation training should address both skills and mindset:
The delegation mindset: New managers often struggle with delegation because they believe doing it themselves is faster, fear losing quality control, or feel guilty giving work to others. Training should address these psychological barriers before teaching techniques.
Task analysis: Not all tasks should be delegated. Training should cover identifying delegable tasks, matching tasks to team member capabilities, and recognising development opportunities within delegation.
The delegation conversation: How you delegate matters as much as what you delegate. Training should cover:
Follow-up without micromanaging: New managers often over-monitor delegated work, undermining the delegation's benefits. Training should address appropriate check-in frequency, recognising when to intervene, and building trust through progressive autonomy.
Training should specifically address common delegation failures:
Dumping versus delegating: Delegation includes support and context; dumping just transfers tasks. Training should distinguish between these and teach the preparation that effective delegation requires.
Insufficient authority: Delegating tasks without delegating decision-making authority creates frustration. Training should cover matching authority to responsibility.
Reverse delegation: Team members sometimes return delegated work to managers. Training should address recognising and preventing this pattern while remaining supportive.
Hovering: New managers often check too frequently, communicating distrust. Training should establish appropriate oversight that supports without smothering.
Feedback training should build specific capabilities:
Observation and specificity: Vague feedback doesn't enable improvement. Training should cover observing behaviour specifically and describing it clearly without inference or judgment.
The feedback conversation structure: New managers benefit from frameworks that structure difficult conversations:
Receiving feedback gracefully: New managers receive feedback from their own managers and sometimes from team members. Training should address receiving input non-defensively and modelling openness to feedback.
Timing and context: When and where feedback happens affects how it's received. Training should cover appropriate timing, private versus public feedback, and creating conditions for productive conversation.
Difficult conversations require specific preparation:
Conversation planning: Training should cover preparing for difficult conversations—anticipating reactions, planning what to say, and identifying desired outcomes.
Emotional management: Difficult conversations trigger emotions in both parties. Training should address managing your own reactions and responding to others' emotional responses.
Staying focused: Difficult conversations can wander or escalate. Training should teach techniques for maintaining focus and returning to the core issue when conversations drift.
Documentation: Some difficult conversations require documentation. Training should cover what to document, when documentation is necessary, and how to create appropriate records.
Time management takes new forms when managing others:
Calendar management: New managers face meeting proliferation. Training should address protecting time, declining meetings appropriately, and ensuring meetings add value.
Prioritisation frameworks: Everything feels urgent to new managers. Training should provide frameworks for distinguishing important from urgent and focusing on highest-value activities.
Interruption management: Team members need access to their manager. Training should address being accessible without being interrupted constantly—establishing patterns that meet team needs while protecting focus.
Administrative burden: Management comes with administrative requirements. Training should address handling administrative tasks efficiently without letting them consume management time.
Many new managers retain individual contributor responsibilities alongside management duties:
Role clarity: Training should help new managers clarify what percentage of their time should go to each role and adjust expectations accordingly.
Transition planning: If responsibilities will transition over time, training should address planning that transition and communicating it clearly.
Personal productivity: New managers still need individual productivity skills, but applied differently. Training should address maintaining personal effectiveness while enabling team productivity.
Energy management: Management is emotionally demanding. Training should address recognising and managing energy drain, building sustainable work patterns, and avoiding burnout.
Performance management training should cover both process and skill:
Goal-setting: Training should cover setting SMART objectives, aligning individual goals with team and organisational goals, and adjusting goals when circumstances change.
Progress monitoring: Goals without monitoring don't drive performance. Training should address establishing check-in rhythms, tracking progress appropriately, and identifying issues early.
Formal review processes: Most organisations have formal review processes. Training should cover organisational requirements, conducting effective review conversations, and writing useful documentation.
Addressing underperformance: New managers often avoid underperformance until it becomes critical. Training should address early identification, progressive response, and documentation requirements.
Performance challenges require specific preparation:
Diagnosing performance issues: Poor performance has various causes—skill gaps, motivation problems, unclear expectations, or external factors. Training should address diagnosing root causes before choosing interventions.
Improvement planning: Training should cover creating performance improvement plans, setting clear expectations, providing support, and establishing consequences.
Legal and policy awareness: Performance management has legal implications. Training should address organisational policies, documentation requirements, and when to involve HR.
Separation decisions: Sometimes performance issues lead to termination. Training should address recognising when this is necessary and handling it appropriately.
Coaching multiplies impact by developing team capabilities:
Coaching versus telling: New managers often default to providing answers rather than developing people's ability to find their own. Training should address when to coach versus when to direct.
Questioning techniques: Effective coaching uses questions to provoke thinking. Training should cover question types, when to use each, and how to facilitate insight rather than dependence.
Development planning: Team members need growth opportunities. Training should address identifying development needs, creating development plans, and providing developmental assignments.
Career conversations: Team members want to discuss their careers. Training should prepare new managers for these conversations and help them support development even when it means losing people.
Teams require different management than individuals:
Team formation: New managers sometimes inherit teams; sometimes they build them. Training should address both scenarios—working with existing dynamics and creating new ones.
Conflict management: Conflict arises in teams. Training should address recognising conflict, distinguishing healthy from destructive conflict, and intervening appropriately.
Meeting facilitation: New managers run meetings. Training should cover effective meeting facilitation—setting agendas, managing discussion, ensuring outcomes, and valuing people's time.
Remote and hybrid considerations: Many teams include remote members. Training should address specific challenges of managing distributed teams.
After mastering fundamentals, new managers benefit from advanced topics:
Strategic thinking: Connecting team work to broader organisational strategy becomes more important as managers develop.
Influence without authority: Working across organisational boundaries requires influence skills beyond direct authority.
Change management: Implementing change through teams requires specific capabilities.
Budget and resource management: Some managers have budget responsibility requiring financial understanding.
Talent acquisition: Hiring decisions significantly impact team success.
Timing affects learning:
Foundation first: Advanced topics build on fundamentals. Introducing them too early overwhelms; introducing them after foundation is established enables application.
Need-based timing: Some topics should be introduced when need arises—budget management when budget responsibility comes, hiring skills when openings occur.
Career stage: Advanced topics prepare managers for progression. Introducing them signals development trajectory and prepares for increased responsibility.
The most important training topics for new managers are delegation (learning to work through others), feedback and difficult conversations (essential for development and performance), time management (preventing overwhelm), communication and expectations (ensuring clarity), and performance management (driving accountability). These topics address immediate challenges new managers face rather than advanced concepts they won't need initially.
Research suggests new managers need significant development—the almost 60% who receive no training struggle unnecessarily. Effective programmes span months rather than days, including initial intensive training followed by ongoing support, practice opportunities, and reinforcement. The forgetting curve erases 75% of learning within a week without application, so spaced learning with workplace practice produces better results than concentrated delivery.
Delegation and setting expectations should come first because new managers need these skills immediately upon role entry. A manager who cannot delegate will try to do everything themselves; a manager who cannot set expectations will create confusion. Feedback skills and time management should follow closely, then performance management and coaching as foundational capability develops.
New manager training should include practical leadership topics relevant to their scope—motivating team members, building trust, creating team culture. It should not include abstract leadership concepts they won't apply—strategic visioning, organisational transformation, enterprise change management. Leadership content should be concrete and applicable to daily team leadership rather than theoretical.
Organisations ensure training transfers through manager involvement (having participants' managers support development), spaced learning (distributing training over time with practice between), application assignments (requiring real workplace practice), peer support (creating cohort connections for ongoing learning), and measurement (tracking behaviour change and holding participants accountable). Training without transfer support produces limited results.
The new manager's manager should discuss training goals beforehand, support practice opportunities, reinforce learning through regular conversations, provide feedback on skill application, and hold the new manager accountable for development. Research shows manager involvement affects post-training improvement more than any other factor. Organisations should explicitly engage managers rather than leaving this to chance.
New manager training content should be refreshed when organisational context changes (new processes, policies, or strategies), when research reveals improved approaches, when participant feedback indicates gaps, and when new challenges emerge (like managing remote teams). The core topics remain relatively stable, but examples, tools, and specific content should evolve to remain relevant.
Leadership training topics for new managers should address the specific challenges of first-time people leadership. The transition from individual contributor to manager is substantial—requiring new skills, new mindsets, and new ways of measuring success. Training that addresses this transition deliberately accelerates development that trial-and-error learning would take years to achieve.
The priority should be practical capability: delegation, feedback, time management, communication, and performance management. These topics address what new managers actually need to know, not what sounds impressive in a training catalogue. Advanced topics can follow once foundations are established.
Organisations that invest in new manager training build management capability systematically. Those that don't create "accidental managers" who learn at their teams' expense—and many never develop the capability that training would have provided.
The almost 60% of first-time managers receiving no training represents enormous missed opportunity. For organisations willing to invest, the return comes through better engagement, reduced turnover, improved team performance, and managers who can lead effectively from day one rather than struggling for months or years.
Invest in training. Build the topics that matter. Prepare new managers to lead.