Why Good Employees Fail as Managers
The skills that got you promoted are the ones that trip you up once you run the team. FedEx Express Malaysia's managing director on how to survive the jump.
You were the fastest on the team, the one who fixed the thing nobody else could fix. So they made you the manager. Six months on, your team is missing deadlines and you are at your desk at nine at night redoing their work for them.
Hardly anyone gets taught to lead before someone hands them a team. You get promoted for your own output, and then the job turns into something your track record says nothing about.
Woon Tien-Long runs FedEx Express Malaysia and its team of close to 900 people. He joined the company in 2010 as a planning engineer, moved into senior operations management out of Penang, spent four years as managing director in Thailand, and came back. He has made that jump more than once, and he is blunt about what it costs.
1. Stop doing the job that got you promoted
Watch a newly promoted manager for a month and you will usually catch them still doing their old job.
Most of the time that is habit rather than laziness. The old job earned the attention that got them noticed, so it feels like the safest thing in the room. Tien-Long puts it plainly: one of the hardest parts of a new role is stopping the work you used to do, because it is not what will make you succeed now.
Keep doing it in front of a team and they will call it micromanaging. Being able to do the work does not mean you should be the one doing it.
There is a second version of this that catches leaders further up. Get senior enough and you genuinely cannot know all the details, and admitting that becomes part of the job. A few years ago Tien-Long was standing near a charging station, wondering out loud whether FedEx could run a cross-border electric truck from Kuala Lumpur to Singapore, and he turned the thought into a project. He set the direction and defined the parameters the team had to work inside, then told the manager running it to make his own calls within those and come back before stepping outside them. After that he got periodic updates and had no idea what was happening most of the time. His part of the job was the vision and the boundaries.
2. Leading is a different job from managing
FedEx does not hire managers, in Tien-Long’s framing. It hires leaders, and he does not mean that as a slogan. A manager handles the situation in front of them. Leading means taking a team through a change when nobody knows yet how it ends, which carries a lot more ambiguity.
And the skill set does not reset only once. Individual contributor to manager is the first reset. Manager to senior manager is another, because you are leading managers rather than doing the leading yourself, and not much of what worked at the first level carries over cleanly.
Simon Sinek has spent years pointing at the same gap: middle managers get handed people to lead and almost no help learning how. Large organisations answer that with programmes. A newly promoted FedEx manager goes through training on how to hire for their own team and how to lead it, and the training runs again in a different form when they move up a level. Smaller companies mostly leave people to work it out on their own time.
The habit that takes longest to build is holding back the answer when you already have one, because a team that gets handed it every time stops looking.
3. Your first three months: change nothing
Ask Tien-Long what a new manager should do in week one and the answer is close to nothing. Spend time with the team. Understand why they do what they do, the way they do it. Do not make changes for three months.
People argue with that when they can already see the fix. Say you have gone through the numbers on a delivery route and worked out that the van could leave an hour later and still clear every stop, which would save a pile of overtime. You are right. So on day three you tell the couriers that what they have been doing is wrong.
And you have lost them, over the timing more than the change. Spend a few weeks on the ground first and you might find out the run leaves early because a particular customer has come to expect delivery ahead of the competition, and keeping that is worth more than the overtime. Or you find nothing of the sort, make the same change in month four, and the team comes with you because you clearly know what you are touching.
New managers rush the changes because they want to prove they deserved the job. That pressure is nearly always self-generated. The boss is not asking for it.
Your first 90 days
Sit with the work before you touch it.
Go to where the job actually happens, and go to learn rather than to inspect. Most of how things are done now was a sensible answer to a problem you have not run into yet.
Write your changes down and hold them.
You will spot things in week one. Keep the list to yourself instead of announcing it. Some of the items will look different by week eight, and the rest will land better once the team knows you.
Ask the basic questions early.
Is everything okay, at work and outside it. It sounds too simple to bother with, and most managers still never ask it until there is already a problem.
Give away one small decision.
Pick something where the worst outcome is mildly annoying. You find out how that person thinks, and the team finds out you did not arrive planning to run everything yourself.
Then start changing things, and say why.
By month four you can explain what you are changing and what you found out that led you there, and the same decision gets a very different reception.
4. Be the last person to speak
Early in his time as a manager, Tien-Long had a lot of ideas and shared all of them. His boss told him, politely, to bite his tongue and let others go first so he could coach their thinking afterwards.
The reasoning is hard to argue with. If the senior person opens the meeting with an answer, everybody agrees. Just do that, Tien-Long said it, and if it goes wrong everyone knows whose idea it was. Nobody learns much from a meeting run that way, and you end up owning a decision the team never really made.
It came back around years later. In a performance appraisal in 2017 or 2018, one of his own bosses wrote in that he should be the last to talk in the room during full management meetings. Asked why, the answer was that he was forceful enough that people with opposing views stayed quiet rather than take him on. Their idea might have been the better one, and even where it was not, hearing it was the only way to know what needed coaching. The instruction came with a caveat: you will know when to speak, once things are properly off track.
Winning the battle but losing the war was another line from those years, and it stuck. He was in his twenties then, an engineer by training and pleased with himself for getting to the answer first, when an appraisal asked whether the smartest guy in the room could hold back on his words.
5. Find the projects that are safe to get wrong
The usual objection here is the corporate calendar. Your team needs room to try things and get them wrong, and your boss wants the result yesterday. Both of those are real.
Tien-Long splits the work in two. Some projects are too urgent or too exposed to let derail, and on those a manager stays close. Even then, the job is to explain the reasoning behind each decision rather than hand over a list of steps, because a team that only gets instructions never picks up how you arrived at them.
Everything else is a training ground, and there is more of it than people think. Break a normal week in any office into pieces and most of it is minor decisions. His own example is which brand of water dispenser to buy, handed to a junior employee with instructions to study it and come back with a recommendation. Nobody upstairs was waiting on that answer. The worst case was a few unhappy colleagues and a manager who could quietly sort it out.
The same logic runs through employee events at FedEx Malaysia, which senior management does not plan at all. They approve the budget and check that the plan makes sense at a high level, and the committee and the running of it belong to the employees. Each location has 80 to 90 people, and a family day can push past 200 once relatives come along. Two months of planning for two hours of fun. Tien-Long’s other argument for handing it over is that senior management is rarely the most fun group in the building, and running something that size teaches coordination in a way no course does.
6. Drive results with the carrot, not the cane
Back from Thailand, he wanted more proactive compliments coming in from customers. Those are hard to earn. A customer has to care enough to write an email nobody asked them for, which usually means somebody went well past the job description.
So he wrote to every employee who received one. By hand, not typed, signed at the bottom. Then the cards were handed out and the compliments celebrated in front of everyone. Four hours of writing in one sitting, and he was ready for a hand massage by the end of it.
It spread, which was the point. Employees inspire other employees far more than management does. He could have gone the other way, posting the complaints and naming the person so the fear did the work, and that mostly buys you compliance.
Run a lean team and the objection is obvious. Fine for a company with 900 staff and an HR department. We are eight people and we do not have the time.
Tien-Long does not accept it, and he has the comparison ready. One of his smaller stations runs on 11 people, which is SME size. The number of tasks a team has to get through is the same whether there are 10 people or 100, and only the quantum differs, which is why the bigger operation carries more support staff. So a 15-minute briefing before work starts, to set up the day and mark the small wins, is available to both. If you cannot find 15 minutes, what you have is a time management problem rather than a headcount problem. On a small team it matters more, because without it nobody knows what anybody else is doing.
7. The Saturday email to yourself
The smallest habit on this list is the one most managers skip. Tien-Long asks the managers he promotes to write an email to themselves. Not a diary. On Saturday, with a coffee, go back over the week and write down what you could have done differently, so that next time something similar comes up you handle it properly.
Some of his team told him they did not need to write anything down because they could sit and think it through. He pushed back, and the ones who eventually tried it were the people who had been running around like headless chickens. Typing it out works differently from thinking about it, mostly because the hardest person to admit a mistake to is yourself, sitting there writing down that a particular decision was stupid.
A few weeks of that and the shape of your week starts to change. You stop doing one thing, put the hours into another, and say no more often than you used to.
What to actually do with this
- Write down the parts of your old job you are still doing, then hand at least one of them over this month. That list is usually where the micromanaging complaints are coming from.
- For the first three months in a new role, collect changes instead of making them. Revisit the list in month four and see how many still look right.
- Ask each person on your team why the work is done the way it is. Assume there was a reason before you assume there was none.
- Stop speaking first. In your next team meeting, put the problem on the table and say nothing until everyone else has, then coach what you heard.
- Split your projects into the ones you cannot let fail and the ones you can. Give the second group away, with the boundaries stated up front.
- When you do stay close to an urgent project, explain the reasoning behind each call rather than issuing steps, or the team will simply wait for the next set.
- Recognise good work publicly and fast. A handwritten note costs nothing and carries further among staff than anything management announces.
- Book 15 minutes at the start of the day with your team, whatever the size of the company. If you cannot find them, the problem is your calendar.
- Write yourself an email every weekend covering what you would do differently. Three or four weeks in you will start recognising your own patterns.
The promotion hands you a job measured on other people’s output, when everything up to that point was measured on your own. You do not have to become a different person for that. The habits that made you excellent are still good habits, and they belong to somebody else on your team now.
We went through the whole conversation with Tien-Long on the channel, including how executives read candidates in the first ten minutes and what to do when you get passed over. More about the company he runs is at FedEx Malaysia:
