Developing first-time managers in Vietnam

First-time managers are usually promoted for being excellent at the individual job, which is the opposite of what management requires. Fast-growing Vietnamese companies feel this most, because they promote quickly and the management layer ends up young in tenure and thin in preparation.

Becoming a manager for the first time is often the biggest single transition in a career, and it is routinely the least supported. LHH's guidance on first-time managers makes the point plainly: when this step is handled badly, the cost lands on the new manager, their team, their customers and the organisation at once. In fast-growing Vietnamese companies the risk is amplified, because people are frequently promoted into management faster than anyone has time to prepare them for it.

The promotion that sets people up to struggle

Most first-time managers are promoted for being excellent at the individual job. That is the trap. The skills that made someone a strong specialist are almost the opposite of the ones that make a good manager: instead of delivering the results themselves, they now have to get results through others, motivate and develop a team, and expand their influence beyond their own desk. Nobody makes that shift by accident, and very few make it well without support. Left alone, a new manager defaults to what they know, which is doing the work themselves, and quietly becomes the bottleneck their team waits on.

Why Vietnamese growth companies feel it most

Two local factors sharpen the problem. The first is pace: companies that have grown quickly promote quickly, so the management layer is often young in tenure and thin in preparation. The second is that the technical-expert-to-manager promotion is especially common, because fast-growing firms reward and promote their best doers. The result is a cohort of capable, motivated people managing teams with little more than instinct and the example of whoever managed them, which may or may not have been good. This is not a criticism of those managers; it is a predictable outcome of not supporting the transition.

What good support looks like

Supporting first-time managers well is not a single training day. It is a combination of a few things that reinforce each other: the core skills of the role, practised rather than just presented, in the shift from managing self to managing others, communication, motivation and difficult conversations; structured support through the first period in the role, when the habits form; and ideally a manager or mentor above them who is themselves equipped to develop people. The aim is that a new manager builds leadership proficiency rather than leaning harder on technical proficiency, and establishes credibility and trust with their team early, before bad patterns set.

It is an investment in the layer everything rests on

First-time and frontline managers are where strategy meets the people who execute it. They shape the daily experience of most of your workforce and most of your customers. Developing them is not a nice-to-have at the bottom of the leadership budget; it is the leadership development with the widest reach, because it touches more people than any executive programme ever will. In a market competing hard for capable people, how well your managers manage is also a large part of whether those people stay.

Whatever you do not teach them, they will copy

A new manager defaults to the example they were given, so the question is not whether your management layer is being trained but by whom. Look at who you promoted in the last year and ask what support any of them actually received in their first months, while the habits were still setting. Our First-time Managers programme is built for that window, with fourteen modules to choose from so the content meets the cohort where it is struggling; tell us what you are seeing and we will say which of them apply.

Programmes run in Vietnamese or English, in person or virtually, and coaching between modules is built into the design rather than sold as an extra.

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