First-Time Managers in Education: Turning Instinct into Skill

First-time managers are often the ones asking the most useful question in the room, and it rarely gets the credit it deserves. A manager promoted into the role for the first time, weeks in, asks their team directly: what do you need from me? It looks like inexperience, but it is actually the single most instinctively sound piece of management practice.

When education organisations promote into management roles, it’s often people with deep subject expertise or years of institutional knowledge, but no formal training in how to manage people. They are first-time managers learning the role in real time, often without a framework to fall back on. And in the absence of one, some of them stumble onto something better than most training programmes teach explicitly: ask, don’t assume.

Asking a team what they need is not a sign of weakness. It is a direct route to motivation and engagement, and it works because it removes guesswork from a relationship that too often runs on assumption. Experienced managers frequently assume they already know what motivates their team, based on what worked for previous teams or their own preferences as an employee. First-time managers, without that accumulated assumption, are more likely to just ask. That is the advantage.

The instinct behind the question

Motivation is not universal. One team member might be driven by recognition in front of senior leadership. Another might want more autonomy and less oversight. A third might simply want clarity on what good performance actually looks like, because nobody has ever told them. Asking surfaces this directly instead of relying on managerial guesswork, and it signals something important to the team: that their manager sees them as individuals with different needs, not as a uniform group to be managed identically.

For HR teams and senior leadership, this matters beyond the individual relationship. Engagement and retention are directly linked to how well a manager understands what their team actually needs, and disengagement is expensive. Recruitment alone costs an average of £2,500 before agency fees, before the further cost of induction and the productivity gap while a replacement gets up to speed. A first-time manager who asks the right questions early protects the organisation from that cost.

Turning the instinct into a repeatable skill

Asking “what do you need from me” is the right instinct, but it works best as an opening move rather than a one-off question. Here are a few practical ways to build on it:

• Ask the question directly, and specifically. “What do you need from me to do your best work?” gets a more useful answer than “how’s it going?” Follow up with “what does good support look like for you?” if the first answer is vague.
• Ask about working style, not just workload. Some team members want detailed instructions and regular check-ins. Others want to be given the outcome and left to get on with it. Neither is wrong, but managing everyone the same way guarantees getting it wrong for at least half the team.
• Ask what recognition looks like to them. Some people want public credit. Others find it uncomfortable and would rather have a quiet word or a note. Getting this wrong can undo the good work of getting everything else right.
• Revisit the question regularly, not just once. What a team member needs in their first month is rarely what they need a year in. A short, regular check-in (even five minutes) keeps the answer current.
• Act visibly on what is said. Asking the question and then doing nothing with the answer is worse than not asking at all. It confirms to the team that the question was a formality rather than a genuine attempt to manage them better.

The training gap behind the instinct

The fact that this idea often comes from the newest, least experienced manager in the room says something worth paying attention to. It suggests the instinct to ask rather than assume is a good one, and that it gets trained out of people over time rather than built on. Left unsupported, that instinct fades. The manager stops asking and starts assuming, because nobody ever gave them a structure for how to keep doing it well as the relationship matures, or how to use what they learn to manage performance, delegate effectively, or handle the harder conversations that follow.

That is precisely the gap that formal management training is designed to close. It does not replace good instinct. It gives it a framework, so a promising habit in month one becomes a consistent management practice in year three, and beyond.

For organisations promoting people into management without formal preparation, and increasingly, most are, the question is not whether first-time managers will have good instincts. Some clearly do. The question is whether those instincts are given the chance to become skill.

If you’re noticing good instincts in your first-time managers and want to make sure they turn into lasting management skills, take a look at LEAD WITH IMPACT, our 12 week virtual development programme designed to help aspiring and current middle leaders to lead with greater confidence, clarity and impact.