The first day of school is a familiar cue for parents. Organizational psychologist Dr. Celina Peerman thinks it should be an equally useful cue for employers, but for a different group entirely: the managers and executives running the workplace. As students head back to classrooms, Peerman is urging organizations to treat fall planning season as a checkpoint for their leadership pipeline, not just their headcount plan, arguing that the skills that earn someone a promotion rarely match the skills the new role actually demands.
Peerman’s argument starts from a familiar but persistently unresolved organizational habit: promoting people into leadership because they were good at something else. Strong individual contributors tend to get elevated because they’re technically skilled, dependable or deeply knowledgeable about how the operation runs. None of that guarantees they can communicate well, coach a struggling employee, hold people accountable, make judgment calls under ambiguity or manage a team through change. “A promotion gives someone a new title,” Peerman said. “It doesn’t automatically give them the skills or confidence to lead people.”
The data backs up how costly that gap actually is. Research from Gartner has repeatedly found that roughly 60% of new managers fail within their first 24 months on the job, with a lack of training, not a lack of intelligence or effort, cited as the leading cause. Separate research from the Center for Creative Leadership found that 60% of new managers report never receiving any training at all when they transitioned into their first leadership role. Gartner The consequences of that gap compound quickly: Gallup’s research has found that managers account for roughly 70% of the variance in team-level engagement, meaning an undertrained manager doesn’t just struggle personally, they measurably drag down the performance and retention of everyone reporting to them.
Peerman’s framing pushes back on a specific organizational habit: treating leadership development as reactive rather than anticipatory. Most companies wait until a role opens, then scramble to prepare whoever gets the promotion, often after the fact. Her recommendation is to flip that sequence. “Future leaders won’t wait until there is an opening on the organizational chart,” she said. “They are already on our teams. The question is whether organizations are intentionally helping them develop the judgment, communication skills, confidence and ability to lead others that they will need next.”
To operationalize that shift, Peerman recommends organizations use the fall planning season to run through five specific questions: who is being developed before a promotion happens, what support first-time supervisors actually receive, when experienced leaders last invested in their own development, what leaders will need to know two or three years out rather than today, and who would be ready to step in if a key leader left tomorrow. That last question in particular functions as a stress test. An organization that can’t answer it with a name doesn’t have a leadership pipeline; it has a set of job titles and an assumption that someone will figure it out when the time comes.
Peerman is also careful to push back against a narrower definition of what leadership development actually looks like. It doesn’t need to be a single class, and it shouldn’t be reserved exclusively for senior teams. She points to mentoring, facilitated learning, stretch assignments, coaching, peer discussion groups, structured reflection, feedback and direct opportunities to practice new skills as legitimate, often more effective, components of a development strategy than formal classroom training alone. That’s consistent with broader workplace research: manager coaching programs have been shown to lift engagement scores meaningfully for both the manager and their team, with effects that persist well beyond the training period itself, rather than fading once a course ends.
Peerman’s larger point is that leadership development doesn’t have an endpoint. “The workplace keeps changing, so leadership has to keep learning,” she said, pointing to new technology, shifting employee expectations, growing organizational complexity and ongoing change as forces that require leaders to keep adapting long after their initial promotion. In an environment where AI adoption alone is reshaping what managers are expected to oversee and evaluate, treating leadership capability as a fixed asset established once at the point of promotion is increasingly a liability rather than a neutral default.
For HR and talent leaders heading into 2027 planning cycles, Peerman’s framing offers a useful diagnostic rather than a prescriptive program. The organizations best positioned heading into next year aren’t necessarily the ones spending the most on leadership training. They’re the ones that can actually answer her five questions with specifics, rather than assumptions, about who’s ready to lead next and what support exists to get them there before the org chart forces the issue.
Market Landscape
Peerman’s commentary lands amid growing enterprise investment in leadership and manager-development platforms, as companies confront both a persistent first-time manager failure rate and declining global engagement scores. As HR technology vendors, including those building on infrastructure from Microsoft and Salesforce, expand AI-driven coaching and skills-tracking tools, the underlying challenge Peerman describes, identifying and developing leadership potential before a role opens, remains a largely human, process-driven problem that technology alone hasn’t solved.
Top Insights
- Organizational psychologist Dr. Celina Peerman urges employers to use fall planning season to assess leadership pipeline strength, not just current staffing needs, ahead of 2027 planning.
- Gartner research shows roughly 60% of new managers fail within their first 24 months, primarily due to inadequate training rather than lack of capability.
- Peerman recommends five diagnostic questions for leadership benches, including whether a ready successor exists if a key leader left tomorrow.
- Leadership development should extend beyond formal classes to include mentoring, stretch assignments, coaching and peer reflection, targeting potential leaders before promotion happens.
- Continuous leadership learning is increasingly necessary as technology, employee expectations and organizational complexity keep evolving, making one-time training insufficient.
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