Section 01 · The GapThe promotion gap nobody talks about.
Your best engineer gets promoted to engineering lead. Your top-performing account manager becomes a team leader. Six months later, their team is struggling and they're quietly wondering if they made a mistake.
It's one of the most predictable failure patterns in business, and one of the most preventable. Research from the Chartered Management Institute consistently shows that over 80% of UK managers are "accidental managers", promoted for their technical expertise without any formal leadership training.
82% of UK managers have had no formal management training
Chartered Management Institute, 2024. The cost: higher employee turnover, lower engagement, and weaker performance across the team.
The cost isn't abstract. Untrained managers drive higher employee turnover, lower engagement, and weaker performance. For HR and L&D leaders commissioning development programmes, the question isn't whether to invest in new manager training, it's which interventions deliver the fastest return.
Here are the five workshops we see making the biggest difference across our client base, from financial services to the public sector.
Section 02 · IdentityWorkshop 1, Mate to Manager.
The single biggest adjustment a new manager faces isn't learning to delegate or run meetings, it's the identity shift from peer to leader. Yesterday you were one of the team. Today, you're expected to set direction, have difficult conversations, and hold people accountable.
Mate to Manager addresses this head-on. The half-day workshop gives new managers a framework for navigating the social dynamics of the transition: how to establish authority without becoming authoritarian, how to maintain relationships while setting boundaries, and how to handle the discomfort that comes with the shift.
The longer a new manager operates without this framework, the harder it is to reset team dynamics later. Schedule it within the first 30 days of promotion. , Lisa O'Reilly, Director, TESS Group
What participants leave with
- A framework to redefine the manager–team relationship
- How to set expectations without alienating former peers
- Tactics to handle resistance and test behaviour
- The start of a personal leadership identity
Section 03 · CoachingWorkshop 2, Coaching Culture.
New managers instinctively default to "telling", jumping in with solutions, micromanaging tasks, and solving every problem themselves. It feels efficient in the short term, but it creates bottlenecks and stifles team growth.
The full-day Coaching Culture workshop introduces a coaching-first approach to management, aligned to CMI and ILM frameworks. Participants practise asking powerful questions, active listening, and guiding team members to solve problems independently. It's not about becoming a certified coach, it's about building the reflexes that make everyday management more effective.
What participants leave with
- Confident use of structured coaching models (GROW, CLEAR)
- How to replace micromanagement with guided autonomy
- Techniques to build team confidence and independent thinking
- How to hold coaching conversations under time pressure
Section 04 · ResilienceWorkshop 3, Leading Through Uncertainty.
If the last few years have taught us anything, it's that managers need to lead through ambiguity, not just stability. Restructures, technology shifts, policy changes, and market volatility are now business as usual.
New managers often freeze when they don't have answers. Leading Through Uncertainty is a half-day workshop, particularly relevant for 2026's restructuring cycles, that gives new managers a practical toolkit for maintaining team morale and performance when the ground is shifting. It covers transparent communication, scenario planning at team level, and how to stay credible when you can't promise certainty.
TESS view
Most "resilience" training feels like wellness fluff. This one isn't. We strip out the buzzwords and focus on the actual moves a manager needs the day after an org-wide restructure email goes out: what to say to your team, what to commit to, and what to refuse to fake.
What participants leave with
- How to communicate honestly without triggering panic
- Frameworks for making decisions with incomplete information
- Tools to maintain team focus during organisational change
- Personal resilience techniques for the leader themselves
Want to scope a new-manager programme for your team?
25-min discovery call. We'll map your cohort to the right combination of workshops + apprenticeships.
Section 05 · AI FluencyWorkshop 4, AI Prompt-Powered Productivity.
This isn't a workshop about "the future of AI". It's a workshop about Tuesday morning, when a new manager has three reports to write, a team meeting to prepare, and a performance improvement plan to draft, all before lunch.
Our AI Prompting Accelerator is half a day, practical, and tool-agnostic, works equally well for teams on Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, or Anthropic Claude. Participants leave with prompt libraries they actually use, not slide-deck theory. AI literacy is now baseline manager skill, not a nice-to-have. This workshop closes the gap fast.
What participants leave with
- A working personal prompt library tied to their actual job
- How to use AI for first drafts (reports, briefs, performance plans) without losing voice
- The boundary between "AI helps me" and "AI replaces my judgement"
- Confidence to coach their team's AI use, not just their own
Section 06 · ConversationsWorkshop 5, Performance & Development Conversations.
Most new managers dread two conversations: the underperformance one, and the development one. They put both off, both get worse, and both blow up at appraisal time.
The Difficult Conversations workshop pairs with Coaching for Performance to give new managers the practical scripts and structures for both kinds of conversation, and the confidence to have them in the moment, not "next week when there's time".
The single biggest predictor of whether a new manager survives their first year? Whether they can have an honest performance conversation without freezing. , Lisa O'Reilly, Director, TESS Group
Section 07 · Fit TogetherHow these workshops fit together, and how to fund them.
The five workshops are designed to be modular: pick what your cohort needs most. Most TESS clients run them as a structured 3-day new-manager curriculum in the first 90 days of promotion, then layer in apprenticeship-level development from month 4.
Every workshop here can be funded through the Growth & Skills Levy. They complement our Team Leader L3 and CMI Level 5 Management & Leadership apprenticeship pathways for sustained, accredited development.
Levy-funded, all five
Workshops can be funded through the Apprenticeship Levy when bolted on to a Level 3 or Level 5 apprenticeship cohort. Stand-alone purchase available for non-levy SMEs.
Ready to build a new-manager programme?
Book a 25-minute discovery call. We'll map your team's stage, pick the right combination of workshops + apprenticeships, and put a 12-month curriculum in front of you within the week.
Lisa O'Reilly is the Managing Director of TESS Group. TESS Group is Ofsted Good and Skills England Approved, with a 72% distinction rate across all programmes.