Written by Jillian Simpson, Regional Policy Lead at Chartered Management Institute (CMI) (May 2025)

I left school with two GCSEs. German and Child Studies. I’d like to tell you I had a plan, but the honest truth is that being a German au pair is a fairly niche career path, and it wasn’t exactly what the job market in Rochdale in the 90s had to offer. So, I did what you did when you were sixteen with no real options. I went to the careers office, which was in the bus station, sat down in front of a woman I’d never met before, and cried.

She was kind enough not to make me feel worse about it. And she put me forward for a YTS (Apprenticeship). That’s how my career started. Not with ambition or a five-year plan. With tears in a bus station and someone putting me on the right bus. The store had two managers. There was Ian, the store manager, who I remember mainly for the endless supply of brews he expected delivering to his desk without being asked. I was sixteen, keen, and apparently well-suited to fetching sandwiches and tea. That was Ian’s assessment of my potential.

And then there was Helen.

Helen believed in me, challenged me, and pulled me up when I got things wrong. She took my questions seriously. Every time I came to her not knowing something, she didn’t just give me the answer. She’d turn it back to me: “What do you think? And where do you think you could find that out?”

Simple words. Quietly, profoundly life-changing.

I didn’t realise it then, but Helen wasn’t just being kind. She was doing something most workplaces still don’t systematically teach: she was managing. Not supervising. Not allocating tasks. Managing. She was building confidence, judgement and independence in someone at the very start of working life. That mattered more than the job itself. It was the thing that kept me there.

Ian wasn’t a bad person. In fact, Ian was typical. He’d been promoted because he was reliable, experienced and knew the store inside out. No one had ever taught him how to develop people, and no one had expected him to. He didn’t choose to be an ineffective manager, he was just never set up to succeed as a leader. An accidental manager.

The Long-Lasting Impact of Good Coaching

What Helen was doing, though I didn’t have the language for it at the time, was coaching. She wasn’t giving me an answer; she was teaching me how to find one. That single thing has shaped me to this day. I became an explorer, not an expert. Experts know all the answers. Explorers know how to find them, how to question them, and how to keep looking. That is what good management looks like. Not always heroic. Not always visible. But quietly, persistently, profoundly life-changing.

A Wider Consequence

Helen held me to a high standard. She cared whether I got it right and guided me when I got it wrong. In doing that she gave me something I hadn’t had before: the experience of my presence and effort actually mattering. When employers tell us young people lack resilience, motivation or work readiness, what they are often describing is a gap at the very start of working life, the first manager someone meets, and whether they learn that work is something to be tolerated or somewhere you grow. The Helens of the world have never been more needed.

The Evidence Is Hard to Ignore

There is clear evidence that the quality of management someone receives, particularly early in their working life, has a lasting impact on confidence, progression and wellbeing. CMI’s landmark report TAKING RESPONSIBILITY - WHY UK PLC NEEDS BETTER MANAGERS found that while one in four people in the UK workforce holds a management role, only 27% of workers describe their manager as highly effective. Of those who don’t rate their manager, half plan to leave within the year. The same research found that 82% of managers enter their roles without any formal training — accidental managers.

Good management isn’t just about performance metrics or productivity. It’s about the conditions you create for the people around you, the difference between someone going home feeling capable or crushed, or crucially, deciding whether work is a place for them at all.

Making the Change

Good management isn’t delivered in policy documents or strategies. It’s delivered in conversations. When a supervisor takes five minutes to explain rather than dismiss. When a young worker makes a mistake and is coached instead of written off. When someone is told, “I think you can do more than this.”

These moments are small, but they are often the ones people carry for years. Good work, in the end, is not a system. It is a relationship.

I think a lot about why I do the work I do, making the case for good management and leadership across Greater Manchester and I keep coming back to the same answer. It’s Helen. It’s always been Helen. Thirty-four years later, she’s still my compass. I started as a girl with two GCSEs and no plan, crying in a bus station in Rochdale. I got lucky twice: once with the woman who pointed me towards a job, and once with the manager who decided I was worth investing in. Not everyone gets that luck. And that, I suppose, is the point. It shouldn’t be luck. It should be the standard.