Management | Leadership | Personal Development

If You’re a New Manager, Pray For Setbacks

The truth about struggling early, and how it gives you an unfair advantage

Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash

He’s got tears in his eyes.

But he won’t cry. He’s punching basketballs across the rooftop court and cussing like a sailor paid by the word.

We’re up here because this is where everyone goes to vent.

But while he’s busy getting angry, I’m trying to keep him present.

Right now he’s in one of the best moments of his life, and he doesn’t even realise. He’s off missing it, trying to hide from it, rejecting it.

The fact is he had a bad interaction with an employee that’s stung his ego.

What feels to him like humiliation and confirmation he’s pathetic is actually an invitation to grow.

It’s a powerful lesson wrapped in a punch in the gut. A mid-term in the curriculum of life, which he’s gonna flunk if he doesn’t wake up.

I know this, because it happened to me.

And I nearly missed it too.

Corporate retreat. Guest speakers. Everyone taking turns sharing advice and ideas.

I stepped up and nailed my presentation.

Or at least, I thought I did.

Chatting to colleagues afterwards, I asked how it went. I expected to hear validation. Instead, I got humbled.

Odd glances. Awkward silences. Then truth.

What I’d thought was a feeling of doing well was actually the duplicity of relief: I was glad to get it out of the way, relieved it was done.

But as the feedback started trickling in, my confidence melted, and the good feeling left me like water through a sieve.

I felt like running. But something called to me from the belly of my pain. A visceral sense this is what I needed, even if my brain begged me to flee.

It was cutting through my delusions of who I was and what I was capable of. And on some level I knew I needed to hear it.

The words of an old friend rang in my head:

“Everything you want is on the other side of what you fear”.

And right there, faced with my idea of myself meeting the reality, I planted important seeds.

They would germinate and mean next time this happened, I’d not only avoid these mistakes, I’d be better because of them.

And uncover a framework for life.

Because these moments aren’t signs you’re failing.

They show you’re improving.

Why mishaps and mistakes matter

“Find comfort in discomfort” sounds like a group chat name for gym bros.

But it’s actually bang on the money.

Because adversity forces adaptation in a way comfort never does. And so if you can stomach getting uncomfortable, you’re going to exponentially increase the surface area of your opportunities to develop.

And as you face challenges and overcome them, you cultivate skills, experience, and expertise that will offer further opportunities and solutions in future.

The problem many managers face is they tend to get dropped in the deep end and left alone. And we obviously don’t want to look incompetent, so we quickly embrace two key strategies:

1. Avoiding things that make us look or feel bad
2. Gravitating towards things that make us feel or look good

Which is the one-two punch from seeking comfort that keeps us down.

The first robs us of chances to grow. The second builds reps in things that don’t add value.

So if you want to learn, the lessons are cheapest — in terms of costs to your reputation, status, and options — when your ego is still small and your role young.

Otherwise you’ll become a manager high on bombast and blagging but low on actual competence.

Pity the manager who’s never faced adversity.

For nobody knows how good they actually are.

Even them.

Discomfort expands capability

In the book *Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance*, author Alex Hutchinson talks about how runners with a higher threshold for discomfort and pain tended to perform better. The reason is running long distance is hard. But the less you let this affect you, the more bandwidth and energy you have for focus, drive, and high performance.

But there’s a secret hiding in here too. And that’s the more you can embrace difficult situations, the more lessons you get.

And if you can trust yourself to get through things, you’re less likely to panic. Meaning you’ve got the clarity to make better decisions and produce better work.

The more discomfort you can stay present through, the more opportunities you can learn from.

And the quicker you’ll grow.

Failure as calibration

A smooth onramp sounds good, until you realise it means you’re getting a false positive.

You want it to be a bit bumpy on the way in, so you can adjust while the stakes are lower.

Avoidance is not a strategy.

Sooner or later you’re going to be tested. The longer you wait, the higher the stakes, but the less tools you’ll have as you’re coming at it fresh.

Failure takes a blacklight to your blind spots. Challenges shoot holes in the comfort blanket of your illusions. And setbacks reveal your character and the reality of your situation faster than praise and positivity.

These are not things to be feared. They’re things to be embraced. And done so as quickly as possible.

When we’re at our best, we’re producing something based on the experience we have. And that experience was earned from not only previous success, but more often than not it’s from our failures.

Separate your observation from your preconception. What most see as a judgement on them and a reason to feel belittled, you can see as a necessary lesson from a personalised curriculum designed by the greatest tutor there is: life.

So while most people read painful feedback as a neon sign that says “I’m not good enough”, high performers only see “Here’s what to work on and here’s how you fix it.”

It’s win-win: you do great, or you grow.

We don’t learn in a straight line

You need to normalise starting imperfectly.

Few people get promoted when they’re ‘ready’ — and often get promoted because of how good they were at their last job (and the suspicion they’ll be good at the new job, even without hard evidence).

We normally get the responsibility then before we get the experience of being responsible.

Blagging is a tactic, not a strategy. It buys you time to develop the competence your words have expressed you already have.

There are some things it pays to know and learn in advance. But some things can’t be properly learned and developed until we have the context of experience. So sure, blag a little to get you in the door. But don’t ride your luck. You need to back it up.

A friend recently got a job as a head of comms for a major global charity. Part of the interview was to write a press release. She’s never done this, so she used ChatGPT to help.

Now she’s responsibile for global press releases. And so it’s her responsibility to fill in the gaps. Which she will, because she’s got the humility to recognise where to learn.

But better people than me forget that, and get drunk on the opportunity and move on, forgetting to fill in the blanks. Years go by with them doing OK, until finally they reach a critical moment where they are forced out of their delusion. And then it’s so much more painful. It becomes existential. Because now it’s not just a signpost for where to improve. Now it’s a judgement on you, in your role, and in your identity.

Embrace that pressure to force progress.

Blagging buys you time. But it’s actually learning and adapting that repays the debt.

The hidden danger of comfortable success

Avoidance creates fragility.

Every difficult conversation you dodge. Every time you protect your ego over embracing a challenge. Every time you sidestep embarrassment to save your face.

You are creating a future version of you less capable, less confident, and less prepared for reality.

We learn from our experiences. Our negative experiences tend to be our greatest teachers, because they force course-correction and adaptation.

But if you learn to avoid difficult situations because they make you uncomfortable, you’ll cut off a huge tap of growth.

So learning to be comfortable in uncomfortable situations is a superpower.

And when you’re a new manager, that’s the time for setbacks.

As you develop in the role and compound your status and relationships, you may feel less and less able to put yourself in situations where you ‘fail’. You may also feel more prepared than you actually are because you’ve done a job for years (without ever really facing challenges, and therefore never really progressing).

Many managers fall into this trap, and stop exposing themselves to failure, cutting off the tap of a lot of their development right when they’ll need it most.

This is experience without adaptation. It’s routine masquerading as mastery.

When you get good at something, it feels easier than it did before you were good at it. True. But this is a downstream payoff, not a goal. It’s a symptom. The trouble is when you’re not actively engaged in addressing this, you run the risk of thinking because you’re comfortable, you must be good.

Comfort breeds complacency when ease starts to masquerade as mastery. Routines hiding flaws.

You’ve been doing something for years, and have therefore assumed you’re good at it. The problem is rather than developing for years, you’ve instead been living the same 12 months on repeat.

This is then supercharged as your status shields you from a lot of the ‘dirty work’. You’ve become successful enough to avoid discomfort. But without dirt under your nails and coal on your face, you’re limiting your ability to learn.

When you aren’t learning, you aren’t moving forward. And if you aren’t moving forward, you’re going backwards.

Conclusion

Setbacks build genuine confidence and authentic capability.

Embarrassment is a momentary tax we all must pay if we want to be better.

Failure is just information. Data. It’s your ego that twists this into judgement.

Untested competence is only one step above delusion.

Being a manager isn’t about avoiding struggles. It isn’t about dodging difficult things or even making everything smoother.

If you truly want to be a successful one, you need to cultivate the traits that get you through the moments when plans fail, the cookie crumbles and the chips are down.

So as a new manager, pray for setbacks.

It’s the quickest, smartest way to avoid the fragility an avoidant approach will bake into your management style.

Because smooth seas do not make good sailors.