From technical expert to team leader: The management gap every growing organization needs to close

Ask anyone who's made the jump from individual contributor to manager and they'll probably tell you: nothing quite prepares you for it. Most people don't follow a defined path to management. They become managers because they were the most accomplished person in their domain — the natural choice when a team needed someone to step up. Maybe the company grew faster than its leadership pipeline. Maybe a reorg shuffled the deck. Maybe someone left and the person closest to the work got tapped. But leading a team calls on a different set of skills than the ones that drove individual excellence.

The four behaviors that hold back new managers

The job of a manager isn't to do the work. It's to create the conditions for other people to do it well. That means giving clear direction, having hard conversations, delegating decisions you used to own, and developing people whose strengths look nothing like yours. Most new managers have never practiced any of that — regardless of industry, company size, or how fast the promotion came. Across the organizations BetterUp works with, four behaviors tend to surface in the gap between what got someone promoted and what the role actually demands.

1. They can't let go of the task. As an IC, trying to personally solve everything feels like excellence. It’s also fun, exciting, and rewarding. But for a manager of a growing team, it puts a low ceiling on how much the team can accomplish. The manager becomes the bottleneck.
   
   
2. They delegate the wrong things. When the work feels high-stakes, the new manager will step in to do it. What they delegate instead is the safe, easy, low-stakes work, which means the team never gets the exposure and experience that builds them into leaders.
   
   
3. They leave little room for disagreement. Much of the value of an individual contributor is around bringing their expert opinion to the table, being prepared to defend their work and their point of view. But when a new manager brings that same “I have all the answers” attitude to a meeting, their team shuts down and disagreement feels risky.
   
   
4. They avoid the performance conversation. Many first-time managers fear talking about subpar performance. And when missing the mark doesn’t get talked about, it doesn’t get fixed, which means the rest of the team carries extra burdens.

The first three of these behaviors are IC strengths applied to the wrong context. The fourth is simply a skill that they didn’t need as an IC, and were not directly taught.

How coaching, not training, fixed the individual contributor to manager transition at Moderna

Moderna’s pandemic-era scale up compressed years of normal growth into months. The team members who got promoted didn't suddenly become different people, they just discovered the gap between individual excellence and leading others firsthand. At the pace a global vaccine effort demands, the four behaviors might have been the default had they not been interrupted before they calcified.

With eight years at the company, Wei Zheng is Executive Director of Oncology Bioinformatics at Moderna. Her team's work supports Moderna's oncology pipeline from early research to the regulated submissions that help decide whether a drug reaches patients. A typical day bounces between document review, cross-functional governance meetings, and coaching her team leads. The deep technical execution work that got her promoted is now a fraction of what's on her calendar.

When Wei first stepped into management, her instinct was the same one that made her a great scientist: roll up her sleeves and solve the problem in front of her. But that instinct was the trap. Instead of delegating, she held on to task-oriented work. Instead of focusing on team development, she micromanaged. Instead of always remaining composed, she sometimes brought stress into conversations.

The shift didn't come from a two-day offsite, a workshop, a leadership curriculum, or a slide deck of frameworks. It came from working with her BetterUp coach, who could reflect her default behaviors back to her and help her rewire her instincts.

Through her work with BetterUp, three changes took hold.

Wei's “aha” moment came the night before a high-stakes external partner meeting. A last-minute change to the briefing package had opened a gap in stakeholder alignment. It’s the kind of moment that pulls a new manager back into doing the work themselves. Wei's coach noticed a beaded bracelet on her desk, woven by her son, and asked her to pick it up.

"She told me: think about all the stakeholders you've already aligned. Imagine them as the beads on this bracelet. You are one of the beads, surrounded by all the others. You are in this together and you are well supported. And all of a sudden, I felt like it's not me versus the room — but rather, we are in this together."

Wei walked into that meeting to align the room, not convince it. Within 24 hours, the group had reached agreement on a genuinely hard decision.

The same system-level thinking shapes how Wei runs her team. In her own words: "pause and reflect, not to solve the problem in front of me, but to solve them with a new system in place." She stopped pulling work back in. She started delegating real strategic decisions to her team leads. Her team leads now run external stakeholder meetings without her in the room.

2. From answer-having to question-asking. A manager who knows everything signals to the team that they don't have to. A manager who asks better questions builds a team that owns the answers. For Wei, that meant trusting her team leads to bring the depth she used to bring herself — and getting comfortable being the one who frames the problem instead of solving it.


3. From avoiding the performance conversation to running it well. Wei's old fear was that telling someone their performance was deficient would feel like an attack on them as a person. The coaching reframe: the conversation isn't about the person, it's about the work. When you’re kind, yet firm on the standard of quality you expect, the conversation stops being a confrontation and starts being coaching. And that’s what the team needed from her.

What CHROs should do differently with first-time manager development

Moderna's experience isn't an outlier. BetterUp works with organizations across industries that face the same transition at scale: technically excellent people promoted into leadership roles without the behavioral support to match. The patterns that Wei navigated — and the interventions that worked — show up consistently. For CHROs building first-time manager programs, here's what the data points to.

1. Separate promotion criteria from readiness criteria. The skills that make someone excellent at individual work are not the skills that make someone effective at leading others. Before promoting a top performer into management, assess whether they can delegate, give hard feedback, and build a team — not just whether they've earned the promotion.
   
   
2. Treat the derailing behaviors as a predictable pattern, not an individual failure. The four behaviors Wei describes — holding on to tasks, delegating the wrong things, shutting down disagreement, and avoiding performance conversations — are not personality problems. They are the default output of promoting technically excellent people without structured support. When you know the pattern in advance, you can intervene before it costs you a team.
   
   
3. Start coaching before the transition, not after the damage is done. Most organizations introduce development support reactively, once a manager is visibly struggling. The more effective intervention is proactive: pair new managers with coaching at the moment of promotion, when instincts are still forming and defaults haven't hardened.
   
   
4. Replace the two-day offsite with ongoing behavioral support. A leadership workshop can introduce a framework. It cannot rewire default behaviors. First-time managers don't need more information about how to lead, they need real-time support for the moments when their instincts are pulling them in the wrong direction.
   
   
5. Measure the team, not just the manager. A manager's development shows up in their team's data before it shows up in a performance review. Track engagement, retention, and promotion rates one level down. If a new manager's team is struggling, that's a development signal.

Moderna has seen the proof in the numbers: a 17% boost in goal attainment, a 16% lift in team cohesion, an 18% improvement in work-life balance, and a 15% increase in team resilience. That’s what happens when you treat the IC-to-manager transition as a behavioral challenge instead of a knowledge gap. Wei is one example, but Moderna has hundreds.

See how Moderna did it →