Leading Before You're Ready: What Malaysian Organisations Get Wrong About Emerging Leaders

I remember my first promotion.

It went something like this:

I had strong technical skills, I was spoke and presented well, I performed well. I had some understanding of business growth.

Sounds familiar?

Most promotions that occur would run something like that.

Someone has been performing well (really well) for a year, maybe two. Their manager has noticed. The business needs more people at the front. And so the conversation happens over coffee or in a performance review: "We think you're ready for the next step."

What comes next is rarely a structured transition into leadership. Usually it's a new job title, a slightly larger salary, and an unspoken expectation that the same qualities that made this person exceptional at their individual work will somehow make them effective at leading other people.

Often, they don't. And the gap between those two things, between performing well and leading well, is where organisations quietly bleed talent, productivity, and money.

The pattern is remarkably consistent, regardless of industry or company size.

A technically strong person gets promoted. They're smart, driven, well-liked - capable of doing their job and generally decent with the people around them. They step into the leadership role with real enthusiasm. Then, somewhere between three months and a year in, things get harder than they expected.

The very qualities that made them excellent individual contributors start working against them. The ability to focus deeply on a problem becomes an inability to let others solve things their own way. The drive to deliver results becomes impatience with a team member who is slower to get there. The instinct for precision creates friction when managing someone whose standards are different.

Nobody told them that leadership requires an almost complete reversal of the skills that got them promoted.

Gallup puts a sharper point on it: companies choose the wrong person for a management role 82% of the time. Not because capable people are rare but because organisations keep selecting for the wrong criteria. They look at what someone has done, rather than at what someone is ready to become.

Performance and leadership potential are different things, and conflating them is one of the most expensive habits a growing company can have.

When leadership development is an afterthought, the consequences show up in the numbers.

Research from the Centre for Creative Leadership links poor leadership to a 29% reduction in organisational productivity and a 23% rise in employee turnover. Up to 32% of voluntary resignations in organisations are attributed to poor leadership - the well-worn truth that people don't leave companies, they leave managers. Replacing a mid-level employee costs, conservatively, between half and twice their annual salary once you account for recruitment, onboarding time, and the knowledge they take with them.

Your best people are watching, too. DDI's 2025 Forecast found that high-potential employees are 3.7 times more likely to leave within the year if their manager doesn't actively invest in their development. High-potentials - the very people organisations can least afford to lose.

Flip it around and the picture changes. The CMI found that organisations which invest seriously in management and leadership development see an average 23% increase in organisational performance and a 32% improvement in engagement and productivity. Not hoped-for outcomes. Documented ones.

The ROI on getting leadership development right is not hard to make. What's hard is prioritising it when there are a hundred other pressures competing for budget and attention.

Here's the assumption worth interrogating or marinating in: that readiness for leadership is something you either have or you don't at the point of promotion.

It isn't. Readiness is ongoing. It starts before the new title and continues long after.

Over the years, I've had versions of the same conversation with emerging leaders - different industries, different companies, different people, but the same thread running through all of them: "I felt completely out of my depth, but I couldn't let anyone see that." So they performed confidence they didn't feel. They avoided conversations they didn't know how to have. They made decisions based on what they thought a leader should do, rather than from any real understanding of their own values or instincts.

That's the actual experience of leading before you're ready. Not recklessness. Not negligence on the organisation's part. Just the honest reality that the development happens in the doing, in the uncertainty and imperfection of actually leading real people through real challenges. Provided, crucially, that experience is supported. Structured. Given space for reflection.

The question isn't "Is this person ready to lead?" It's "What do they need to grow into it and are we giving them that?"

Skills training has its place. Giving feedback, running effective meetings, managing performance conversations - there are all important. But skills without identity are brittle.

Before someone can lead with any real consistency, they need to know who they are as a leader. What they value. How they behave when things go sideways. What their relationship is with conflict, with authority, with their own need for control. Without that foundation, the skills stay surface-level - applied intermittently, inconsistently, because they're not anchored to anything deeper.

The most effective leadership development doesn't just teach people what to do. It helps them understand who they are, so that what they do flows from something real.

The leadership development conversation has rightly focused on emotional intelligence: the capacity to understand and regulate your own emotional responses, and to read and respond thoughtfully to others. That matters. It's necessary.

But EQ alone doesn't account for what happens in the space between people.

Relational intelligence - the ability to build genuine connection, to sustain trust over time, to repair relationships when they fracture, to read the social dynamics of a team and move through them with skill —-is a distinct capability. Someone can have decent self-awareness and still be completely ineffective at creating the conditions for their team to thrive together. Harvard Business Review research consistently shows that leaders who sustain high performance over time are distinguished not just by how they manage themselves, but by the quality of the relationships they build around them.

EQ is internal. Relational intelligence is what happens between people. Both matter. Most programmes only develop one of them.

The CMI's research found that managers who receive formal training are more likely to feel confident (83% versus 71% for untrained managers) but more significantly, they're more likely to act with integrity, to challenge poor behaviour, and to create psychologically safe teams.

Confidence in leadership isn't built by being told you're capable. It's built through navigating real difficulties and finding out what you're made of. That means organisations need to create conditions where emerging leaders can experiment, stumble, receive honest feedback, and try again without a single mistake becoming a defining mark against them.

That's not softness. That's what learning actually requires.

If you have high-performing people approaching leadership, or already in it, and they're not receiving structured development, the gap almost certainly exists. The only real question is how long before it costs you in ways you can measure.

Waiting isn't neutral. Every month without development is a month where habits form that will need unlearning, where relationships get built on unstable ground, where an emerging leader quietly carries the weight of feeling like they're winging it.

The investment in changing that is modest relative to what the alternative costs. And the leaders who come through genuine development work - who know themselves, who can connect honestly, who lead from something solid - are the ones who build the kind of teams organisations remember.