A few months after a promotion, many founders start to wonder whether they made a mistake. The new sales manager still handles the biggest accounts herself. When a rep sends a quotation with the wrong prices, she corrects it and sends it out without saying anything. She hasn't raised the missed deadlines with the colleague she used to sit next to. And the routine decisions that were supposed to leave your desk still arrive there, usually on WhatsApp.
So you call her in and say what founders tend to say. "You need to delegate more." "Hold your people to their targets." "Stop waiting for me." "Start thinking like a manager."
She agrees with all of it. She probably feels embarrassed. Then she walks out without knowing what to do differently the next time a rep misses a commitment or a customer escalates. You've told her you're disappointed. You haven't yet shown her what to do.
Why your best performer struggles
Managing is a different job from the one they were good at. Before, they were responsible for their own work. Now they're responsible for whether other people's work gets done well. That means handing over work they could do faster themselves, giving feedback people may not like, and making calls a former peer will disagree with. Their track record tells you they were good at the first job. It tells you much less about the second.
There's research on this. A 2019 study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics by Alan Benson, Danielle Li and Kelly Shue, Promotions and the Peter Principle, looked at sales staff in 131 firms. The firms tended to promote their best sellers, and the stronger someone's sales record before promotion, the worse their team tended to perform under them. Our article on the difference between a manager and a senior employee covers how to judge this before you promote. This one is about what to do once you have.
Fix the role before you coach the person
In our work with founder-led businesses, we often find the new manager is being coached inside a role that leaves no time to manage. They've kept their old client list and the hardest technical work, and they still drop everything when the founder needs a quick answer. When that fills the week, feedback waits and delegation gets rushed. More encouragement won't change it.
Before you start coaching, settle four things with them:
- What they've stopped doing. A promotion should take work away as well as add it. If they're giving up accounts, decide which go to whom, and by when.
- Which team result they're responsible for: collections for the region, on-time deliveries, the team's monthly sales. Their own activity is no longer the measure.
- What they can decide without you. Give real limits. They can approve a credit note up to KSh 50,000, change the rota, and send back work that isn't up to standard. A manager who has to check everything with you ends up as a messenger.
- When they manage. Protect some time each week for the team, and don't fill it with urgent requests of your own.
Turn complaints into instructions
"Be more assertive" and "you're too controlling" describe how you feel. A manager can't practise them. Translate each one into something they can do on a specific occasion.
Instead of "be more assertive", try: "When someone misses a deadline, don't agree a new date until you've found out why the first one was missed and agreed what will change."
Instead of "delegate better": "Give the coordinator the whole job, including the result. Don't take it back to fix it yourself unless it goes past the limit we agreed."
Instead of "stop escalating everything": "Settle routine customer complaints within your KSh limit. Bring me anything bigger, with your recommendation."
Coach on real situations
General advice rarely sticks. Coaching works better when it's attached to something the manager has to handle this week, such as a rep who keeps missing call targets or a customer threatening to move their account.
Start by working out what's in the way. When a new manager doesn't act, there are a few possible reasons. They may not know how to run the conversation. They may know how, but be uneasy confronting someone who was their peer last month. Or they may assume you'll overrule them anyway. Each needs a different response. A training course won't help if the real problem is that you haven't given them the authority.
Prepare them beforehand. Ask what result they need from the conversation, what they're tempted to avoid, and what they'll do if the person pushes back. Help them think it through, but don't hand them a script. If they repeat your words, the judgement is still yours.
Let them lead, and don't rescue them. This is where many founders slip. The meeting gets tense or slow, so you step in and take over. The problem gets solved, and the manager learns that difficult situations still belong to you and that waiting for you is safer than deciding. If their decision is reasonable and within their authority, let it stand, even if you'd have done it differently. Our article on how founders accidentally train managers to wait looks at this habit in more detail.
Talk it through afterwards. What did the employee understand? Did the manager take back work that should have stayed with the employee? What would they change next time? Give feedback on one behaviour at a time.
Then hand over more. As their judgement improves, raise their limits, give them bigger customer decisions and review them less often. The coaching is working when sound decisions get made in rooms you're not in.
What this looks like in practice
Take an agricultural inputs distributor in Eldoret with six sales reps covering the North Rift. (This is an illustrative example, not a client.) The founder promotes the top rep to sales manager. Three months in, she's still serving her three largest agrovet customers herself, and the reps' weekly numbers still go to the founder's phone because that's where they always went.
The founder and the new manager sit down and agree that two of her accounts move to reps by the end of the month and the third stays with her. Her target becomes the team's monthly collections. She can approve discounts and credit extensions up to an agreed amount, and the reps now report to her. Every Monday the two of them spend half an hour on one live situation. This week it's a rep whose collections have slipped two months running. She runs that conversation and the founder stays out of it. On Friday they talk about how it went.
None of this is complicated. What makes it hard is keeping it up every week for six months while the founder is also running the business.
Where it usually breaks down
Many founders already know a new manager needs a clear role, real authority and some coaching. The trouble is that it competes with everything else, so it happens in bursts. There's coaching in a slow month, and it stops when a big order lands. The role gets clarified in conversation and never written down. A year later you have a manager with a title who still depends on you.
A new manager does better when the business around them already has a way of managing performance: written expectations for each role, regular check-ins, a record of what was agreed and reviews that draw on that record. That gives them something to manage with. Without it, each new manager has to invent their own approach, and many will copy whatever they saw you do.
That's the work Talentos does with founder-led businesses. The Performance Picture is a ten-working-day assessment of how performance is actually managed across your business. We hear from leadership and staff, look at the records, and show you where things break down and what to fix first, including whether your managers have the authority and the time to manage. If you'd like a first read before that, try the free three-minute Quick Picture.
This article gives general information on Kenyan employment law and performance management. It isn't legal advice for a specific case.