Earlier this year, my research on the Individual Contributor (IC) to First Line Manager (FLM) transition in clinical research was published in a peer-reviewed international journal. The study involved in-depth semi-structured interviews with 10 senior leaders across Contract Research Organisations — Directors, Senior Directors, Associate Directors, and a COO — with a combined professional experience exceeding 200 years.
What those ten leaders told me was candid, specific, and at times surprising.
This article distils the most important findings into plain language. It is not a list of generic management tips. If you are a Clinical Research Associate, Clinical Trial Manager, or any individual contributor in this industry considering a move into management — this is what the people who will hire, develop, and evaluate your performance are actually thinking.
The numbers alone should give you pause: 60% of new first-line managers receive no formal training upon transition, 26% feel unprepared for the role, and 20% are rated as poor performers by their own teams. Yet 74% of first-line manager success is driven by behavioural and relational factors — not technical skills. The industry knows this is a problem. This research is part of addressing it.
1. The role is not what you think it is
The most consistent theme across all ten conversations was this: most people who struggle in the transition do so because they fundamentally misunderstand what the management role requires of them.
One Senior Director with 20 years of experience described it with a memorable analogy: “It’s like a good player who was superb on the ground now decides to coach. You lose the centre stage.”
As an individual contributor, you are the action. Metrics are green or red based on your work. You are visible, accountable at a personal level, and rewarded for what you do. In a management role, your work is largely invisible — it happens through other people. Your team’s performance is your performance.
A COO with 31 years of experience put it plainly: the transition requires “unlearning certain things from the previous role.” Not adding new skills on top of existing ones, but actively letting go of habits and identities that made you successful before.
Another Senior Director framed the key question every aspiring manager must honestly answer: “Are you okay taking the backstage and focusing on the coaching and mentoring role?”
If your honest answer is no — if you want to stay in the thick of the action and keep the limelight on you — management will be a frustrating experience for both you and your team.
2. Emotional intelligence is non-negotiable — and commonly missing
Ask any of these ten leaders what they look for beyond technical knowledge, and emotional intelligence (EQ) comes up within the first few sentences. Ask them what new managers most commonly lack, and EQ comes up again.
One Director said it clearly: “Emotional quotient is important. Should be more balanced than impulsive. Relationship building.”
Another, an Associate Director with 16 years of experience, pointed to something specific and underappreciated: body language and tone. “Body language and tone are very important. Especially in a virtual world, through video calls. You can set or destroy the tone of a meeting with body language.”
What does low EQ look like in practice? The leaders described patterns they had seen repeatedly:
– Reacting impulsively rather than taking time to formulate a response
– Treating team members like projects instead of people — tracking deliverables without understanding the human context behind them
– Expressing empathy in words but not in action (one leader described a new manager who ran engagement activities that team members found pressurising rather than enjoyable — well-intentioned, but tone-deaf to what the team actually needed)
– Becoming defensive when receiving feedback instead of using it as information
The Associate Director added something that stuck with me: “Should be able to manage people like people, not projects. Should be able to shift their mindset from managing scheduled deliverables to humans, who will come with different challenges and situations every day.”
3. Delegation is where most new managers quietly fail
Across all ten interviews, one practical failure came up more than any other: the inability to delegate effectively.
One Director estimated that roughly 90% of new managers struggle here. The reason is deeply psychological: “As they have been ICs, they work on their own. Too much perfectionist. Should learn on delegation.”
When you have been an individual contributor, quality control was entirely in your hands. You could ensure the work met your standard because you did the work. In a management role, that control is gone. You must trust others — and that trust is genuinely difficult for high-performers who have built their careers on personal execution.
The consequences are predictable. New managers who cannot delegate become overwhelmed, micromanage their teams, stunt their team members’ development, and ultimately underperform at the managerial level despite working harder than ever.
A Senior Director offered a useful reframe: “Delegation helps people feel valued. As a learning opportunity for someone.” Delegation is not giving away your work. It is a deliberate act of developing your team — identifying who can grow through a particular challenge, explaining why you are giving it to them, and creating the conditions for them to succeed.
The practical advice from an Associate Director was specific: “Assess the strengths of your team members and assign tasks. Let them understand why you are delegating and what will it bring for them at individual and team level.”
4. The “boss attitude” is the fastest way to lose your team
Multiple leaders described a pattern they called, in various ways, the “boss attitude” — new managers who interpret their promotion as an elevation in status rather than a shift in responsibility.
The signs are recognisable: taking decisions without explanation, treating team members as subordinates rather than collaborators, expecting compliance rather than earning respect, and in some cases becoming part of gossip or power dynamics that erode team culture.
One Director described the damage directly: “The boss kind of attitude once moving into the role has damaged people.”
A Senior Director added a nuanced version of this: some new managers, rather than becoming overtly authoritative, instead gravitate toward the highest performers in their team and inadvertently sideline others — creating favouritism, disrupting team culture, and building dynamics that are difficult to repair.
The leaders were consistent: respect as a manager is earned through competence, consistency, and care — not through title. Domain knowledge helps (several mentioned that technical credibility earns early respect), but it is interpersonal behaviour over time that determines whether a team genuinely follows you or merely complies with you.
5. Decision-making is a new muscle — and it takes time to build
Several leaders identified decision-making as the skill gap that surprises new managers most. As an IC, most decisions were task-level: how to approach a monitoring visit, how to manage a query, how to prioritise a workload. Management decisions are fundamentally different — they often involve people, ambiguity, incomplete information, and consequences that ripple through a team.
One Director described what he commonly observes: “Confused about taking decisions. They need to learn taking their own decisions. Should understand their limitations.”
A Senior Director spoke about the risk of what she called “tunnel vision” — new managers who believe they already know how things should work, leading to rigidity and, eventually, micromanagement. The better approach is to come in with genuine curiosity, suspend early judgments, and take time to observe before drawing conclusions.
The leaders also noted a specific challenge: new managers often hesitate to make decisions at their level, checking upward for things they should be handling themselves. This erodes the team’s confidence in their manager and creates bottlenecks. Building decision-making confidence — knowing what is yours to decide, and owning that space — is one of the most important early developmental tasks.
6. Self-awareness separates the ones who grow from the ones who stall
Across every interview, the leaders who described the most successful transitions pointed to one quality above all others: the willingness and ability to reflect honestly on oneself.
A Senior Director with 30 years of experience described what successful new managers do differently: “They make a deliberate mindset shift such that they stop trying to do their previous job better than everyone else, but step back. They don’t seek to be superior to their team but rather leverage their expertise and experience.”
This requires a degree of self-awareness that not everyone possesses naturally — the ability to notice your own patterns, question your assumptions, and actively seek information about how you are landing with your team.
The leaders who described struggling transitions consistently pointed to the absence of this quality. New managers who were defensive about feedback, who blamed their team members for problems that had roots in their own behaviour, or who simply did not create conditions for honest input — these were the ones who stalled or failed.
One Senior Director offered a concrete indicator: “Ability to do self-reflection. People don’t understand why and what they are doing. So there is a lack of self-drive.”
Proactive feedback-seeking — from your team, your peers, and your manager — is not a sign of weakness. In the eyes of these ten leaders, it is one of the clearest signals that someone is ready to grow into the role.
7. What these leaders look for before recommending someone for promotion
Beyond the themes above, I asked each leader what they actually look for when identifying an IC ready for a management role. Some patterns emerged clearly.
They look at how you behave in collaborative situations before you have formal authority. Do you naturally bring people together? Do you take initiative on cross-functional work? Do others seek your input and trust your judgment even when you are not their manager?
They look at your attitude toward others’ development. Do you share knowledge generously, or do you guard it? Do you help junior colleagues even when it is not required?
They assess your motivation carefully — and with scepticism. Several leaders noted that peer pressure (“everyone else is going for management“) is a common and problematic driver. One Senior Director’s advice to senior managers was direct: “Work with them on the clarity of why they want to move into people management role.”
And they watch for the learning mindset — not just performance, but how you respond to setbacks, how you incorporate feedback, and whether you actively seek to grow beyond your current capability.
The question to ask yourself
After ten conversations with people who have spent decades on the other side of this transition, one question distils everything:
Are you moving toward something, or away from something?
Moving toward something — genuine interest in developing other people, in navigating complexity through relationships, in operating at the level of strategy and culture — is a solid foundation for management.
Moving away from something — escaping the pressure of individual performance, seeking status, following peers — is a fragile one.
The leaders I spoke to can tell the difference. More importantly, so can your team.
This article is based on: Agrawal, V., & Bhandar, M. (2026). Building First-Line Leadership in Contract Research Organizations: Senior Leaders’ Perspectives on Critical Transition Competencies. International Journal of Current Science Research and Review, 9(1), pp. 426–435. DOI: https://doi.org/10.47191/ijcsrr/V9-i1-56.
If you found this article useful, share it with a colleague who is thinking about making the move into management. And if you are a senior leader with your own perspective on this transition, I would love to hear from you in the comments.