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Managing Managers: Leading Leaders and Scaling a Team
2,878 students
Managing Managers: Leading Leaders and Scaling a Team
managing managers | leadership development | people management | delegation | 1 on 1 | feedback | succession planning
Last updated 9/2026
English
English [Auto],
What you'll learn
- Develop managers deliberately, using the ten competencies from the Gallup and Google research
- Teach delegation through six distinct levels, and recognise micromanagement and seagull management in someone else's behaviour
- Run a one-to-one with a manager, where the subject is their team rather than their tasks
- Give feedback to someone whose own job is giving feedback, which is a different conversation entirely
- Decide what to pay, when to raise it, and how to keep a manager a competitor is calling
- Build a succession plan with a 9-box grid, so promoting someone does not create a hole
- Set the goal system your managers cascade to their own teams through OKR
- Control a layer you cannot observe directly, without turning it into surveillance
- Learn alongside Mike's 1.6 million students from 185 countries
- Get the author's experience from Preply, Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank
Explore related topics
Course content
16 sections • 44 lectures • 22h 14m total length
Requirements
- Managers reporting to you, or that situation arriving shortly
- Experience of managing individual contributors, since this builds on it rather than repeating it
- Willingness to stop solving problems that are now somebody else's to solve
- English at intermediate level or above, since all lessons are in English
- A spreadsheet for the 9-box grid and the development plans
Description
This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.
The day your direct reports became managers, your job changed and nobody told you. The title stayed the same, so it is easy to assume the work did too.
It did not. You have stopped managing work and started managing judgement, and judgement cannot be checked the way a deliverable can.
What the second layer changes
You no longer see the thing being produced. You see a manager's account of it, filtered through what they think you want to hear. You cannot fix a problem directly without undermining the person whose problem it is, so every intervention costs something. A manager who is struggling hides it better than a specialist would, because admitting it feels like admitting they were promoted too early. And when you finally promote someone, their old role is empty and there was no plan for that.
The skills that made you a good manager of specialists are not sufficient here. Some of them are actively in the way.
How the course is built
Forty-two lessons in four parts. Developing other managers first, eight lessons: the ten competencies from the Gallup and Google research, how to teach strategy and performance management rather than doing it for someone, the six levels of delegation and how to spot micromanagement in another person's behaviour, situational leadership, and communication that survives being passed down a layer.
Then the full craft your managers need, twelve lessons of people management: building a team, developing experienced and junior people differently, one-to-ones, choosing a deputy, motivation, salary decisions, bonus schemes, retention, setting direction, OKR, teamwork, and control that does not become surveillance. You cannot coach what you have not systematised.
The three conversations, and the bench
Then the three instruments a second-line manager needs most and usually applies worst. Delegation with RACI and matched task difficulty, because delegating to a manager means delegating a decision rather than a task. The one-to-one, where the subject is their team rather than their to-do list. And feedback given to someone whose own job is giving feedback, which is a different conversation and a more defensive one.
And finally succession, six lessons. The 9-box grid, identifying which roles would actually hurt to lose, developing a bench through rotations and stretch projects, the transparency question nobody enjoys, and the metrics that tell you whether the bench is real. Because a manager with no successor cannot be promoted, and eventually that becomes their problem with you.
Who is teaching this
Mike, the number one HR instructor on Udemy. More than 1.6 million course enrolments, over 150,000 professionals trained, PHRi and SHRM-CP certified, HRCI representative in more than 10 countries. I built the people function of the unicorn Preply and worked at Wargaming, Alfa-Bank and iDeals. I have promoted strong specialists into management without preparing them and watched what it cost both of us.
What is included
Lifetime access to all course materials
Active instructor support in the Q&A section
Udemy Certificate of Completion
Practical assignments and real business cases
A section with additional courses, tools and resources
Start with the uncomfortable question
For each manager reporting to you, write the name of the person who would take over if they left tomorrow. Blank lines are not a succession problem yet — they are the reason you cannot promote anyone. Enrol now and start the first lesson today.
Who this course is for:
- Managers whose direct reports became managers, which is a different job with the same title
- Heads of department running two or three team leads and one former peer
- Founders whose company grew a second management layer this year
- Senior leaders whose managers are competent individually and inconsistent as a group
- HR and people leaders designing a leadership development programme
- Anyone promoted above the level they know how to manage
- Managers whose best team lead has just been approached by a competitor