Jon Antonucci founded SML Training Company (formerly SML Consultive) after seeing what happens when companies promote their strongest employees and leave them to learn how to lead on the job.
Employees were still leaving despite efforts to improve retention through pay, training, and how people were treated. Jon Antonucci, in a prior company, traced part of the problem to a decision the company had made with good intentions: it promoted people who excelled at their jobs. Those employees knew the work. Suddenly, they were expected to teach it, delegate it, and correct it when it went wrong. That experience helped shape SML Training Co., the leadership training firm he founded in 2023.
“We gave them zero tools for how to fill that role,” Jon told Greer News, recalling the transition employees faced after a promotion.
The pressures on managers have become harder to overlook. In its 2026 workplace report, Gallup found that global manager engagement fell from 27% in 2024 to 22% in 2025. For a newly promoted supervisor, the strain can show up in an ordinary decision. A task is running late, and doing it personally seems quicker than explaining what needs to change. Taking it back may save the afternoon. It also means the employee has one less chance to learn how to handle the task independently.
What Changes When the Job Becomes Managing People
While developing training at a specialty courier company, Antonucci realized that, no matter how good the operational training was, it was not improving the challenges with the floor supervisors and managers. When he was asked to build training specifically for team leads. He pressed for the sessions to begin with how to lead a team. Unfortunately, much of the external material he found was aimed at executives. His audience was dealing with more real-world questions like, how to give direction to people who, until recently, had been their peers. He drew on material he had developed in earlier roles and built it into weekly sessions.
Consider a new supervisor whose team keeps sending incomplete handoff notes. The supervisor could remind everyone to be more thorough, then spend the next week filling in the blanks. A clearer conversation would begin with the last handoff and identify what was missing. The supervisor and employee could then agree on what every note needs to contain and check the next few together. That gives the employee a standard to work from and the supervisor a way to see whether the instruction helped.
Those are the kinds of skills SML Training Co. put into its 12-session Foundational Pillars of Leadership course. Participants engage with nine pillars of leadership, including delegation, communication, and how to respond when expectations go unmet. Each session includes an exercise designed for immediate use, with assignments between sessions and two recap sessions. To graduate, participants must complete the assignments, attend at least nine sessions, and be present for both recap sessions.
Making Time to Teach the Work
Delegation can be especially uncomfortable for someone promoted because they were the person everyone counted on to get things done. They already know how to handle the hardest assignments, and the urge to step in is strongest when the team is busy. Giving someone else a piece of that work takes time up front. It means explaining what a good result looks like, deciding when to check in, and giving the person enough room to make decisions along the way.
For middle managers, the work also runs in the other direction. A supervisor may be the first person to hear that a new scheduling rule leaves a shift short-handed. The people who set the policy need to hear what happened on the floor, and employees need to know whether the problem is being addressed. Both conversations depend on a manager who can describe what happened plainly and follow up.
Antonucci extends that approach in his book, Servant Minded Leadership: How Mindfulness Changes Servant Leadership. The chapters end with short summaries, and the concepts come with actions readers can try in their own workplaces. His use of the word “servant” carries a practical obligation. A supervisor who expects someone to improve owes that person a clear account of what needs to change and a chance to practice it. “The question is only if that impact is positive or negative,” Jon told Greer News, describing the influence a leader has on a team.
For a company about to promote a team lead, there is a simple place to start. Identify a conversation that the employee will probably face in the first few weeks and give them time to rehearse it with their own manager. A supervisor practicing how to address a missed deadline can learn where to pause, what to ask, and how to agree on a next step before sitting down with the employee. The first real conversation will still require judgment. At least the new manager will have had one chance to work through what to say before someone on their team is waiting for an answer.
