Certain aspects of the present disclosure provide techniques for managing beam failure recovery operations. A method that may be performed by a user equipment (UE) generally includes determining at least one reference signal (RS) associated with a first cell that is configured without a control-resource set (CORESET). The method also includes monitoring the at least one RS associated with the first cell. The method further includes detecting a beam failure on the first cell based on the monitoring of the at least one RS.