There is a conversation I have had in nearly every organisation I have worked with across Ghana. It starts differently each time but ends in the same place.
The organisation has a team that is underperforming. The manager seems frustrated. Staff morale is inconsistent. Results are unpredictable despite a capable group of people. And when you dig into the root of the problem, the answer is almost always the same.
The manager was never taught how to manage.
They were excellent at their job. The best salesperson, the sharpest analyst, the most reliable officer. So they were promoted. And in being promoted, they were given responsibility for other people without being given any of the tools, frameworks, or skills that effective leadership requires.
This is one of the most common and most expensive mistakes organisations make. And it is not a criticism of the managers themselves. Most of them are working hard and genuinely trying. The problem is not effort. The problem is that nobody gave them what they needed to succeed in a fundamentally different kind of role.
What does an untrained manager actually cost an organisation?
The direct costs are visible: missed targets, staff turnover, time spent managing grievances and conflicts that should never have escalated. But the indirect costs are even larger.
- A team whose potential is capped by the ceiling of its manager's effectiveness
- A culture of inconsistency where different managers apply different standards to the same situations
- Good people who leave not because of the organisation, but because of the person above them
- Institutional knowledge that walks out the door with every resignation
- The time a senior leader spends managing their managers rather than managing the institution
Over eight years as Chief Human Resources Officer at Cocoa360, I saw this pattern repeatedly — not just within that organisation but in the dozens of organisations EPLI worked alongside. The pattern does not discriminate by sector. It appears in public institutions, private companies, NGOs, fintech startups, and established manufacturers alike.
Promoting your best performer is not a leadership development strategy. It is an assumption. And in most cases, it is an expensive one.
The fix is straightforward, even if it requires deliberate investment. Train the people you put in charge of other people. Not a one-day workshop. A structured, practical programme that equips them with the frameworks for performance management, the tools for handling difficult conversations, the skills for building accountability into their team's daily work, and the confidence to lead rather than simply supervise.
The return on that investment is not theoretical. At one organisation EPLI supported, supervisory training combined with a new performance management framework reduced a 40% annual staff turnover to less than 1% within twelve months. The talent was always there. The leadership infrastructure to retain and develop it was not.
The question every leader should be asking is not "do we have good people?" Most organisations do. The question is: "Are the people we have put in charge of our good people equipped to lead them?"
If the honest answer is no, that is not a failure. It is simply the next thing to build.