Managers make the difference — but they need help

“They’re broken.”

This was how a senior executive responded when asked about the current status of their management team. For the past 5 years, managers have guided their teams through nonstop disruption. A pandemic. Rapid technology change. Economic uncertainty. Ongoing social and political volatility.

The story never ends. 

“If you have questions, talk to your manager” now carries a heavier burden. Employees still look to managers for clarity and direction, yet the pace of change has outstripped anyone’s ability to have complete answers. Expectations have risen even as certainty has declined.

Managers are asked to be everything to everyone. They are expected to deliver operational results, translate change, adopt new technologies, and support the human needs of their teams, all at the same time. It’s not surprising that managers continue to report higher levels of burnout than individual contributors, a pattern Gallup has consistently documented in its workplace research.

The past few years have reinforced just how much managers shape the employee experience. Arlington Research found a clear relationship between manager effectiveness and retention. Employees who chose to leave their jobs reported significantly lower satisfaction with their managers than those who stayed (66% compared to 8%). 

The conversation has shifted from a Great Resignation to sustained instability. Employees are no longer making one-time decisions about work. They are continuously reassessing workload, flexibility, growth, and trust in leadership. In this environment, managers are the single most important lever organizations have to influence engagement, performance, and retention. 

They make the difference. But they need clarity, tools, and support to lead effectively in a workplace defined by constant change.

The management capability gap is not new. It’s just more visible and costly.

Gallup’s State of the American Manager research found that only 18% of managers had the talent required to succeed in their roles. While this data was collected in 2015, the underlying pattern remains. Most managers are still hired or promoted based on tenure, technical expertise, or past individual performance rather than demonstrated people leadership skills. They may know how to run the business, but many are far less prepared to coach, motivate, and empower others.

Management training has not closed this gap. Organizations know they have a problem. Leadership development remains a massive global industry, estimated at more than $300 billion annually. Unfortunately, traditional training just cannot keep pace with reality. Organizations keep investing. A Randstad survey found that employers were significantly more likely to provide skills training to managers than to individual contributors. 

It’s just not working.

A majority of U.S. workers believe their managers would benefit from better training on how to do their jobs. This disconnect points to a design flaw, not an effort gap.

Managers are stretched thin. They are accountable for performance, staffing issues, change adoption, and employee wellbeing. They have little capacity for development that pulls them away from their teams or adds tasks to already overloaded schedules. Shortcomings in development further compound the problem. As bench strength erodes, organizations default to a “next person up” approach, elevating managers based on immediate operational need rather than readiness.

This perpetuates the cycle. Underprepared managers struggle. Engagement declines. Turnover increases. And the talent gap widens further. Gallup has shown that managers account for roughly 70% of the variance in employee engagement. When organizations fail to address manager capability in practical, scalable ways, performance and retention suffer as a result.

Companies need managers who can run the business and deliver against clear KPIs. They also need managers who can lead people through ongoing disruption, rapid technology advancement, and shifting work expectations. The role has expanded, but the job description is outdated. Success now depends on a deliberate balance of operational capability and human leadership.

This balance does not happen by accident. Managers must be given explicit permission and structural support to lead.

When managers spend most of their time buried in manual processes, the human side of the role becomes optional. Organizations cannot solve this through training alone. L&D must partner with operations, HR, and IT to examine how managers actually spend their time and identify where capacity is being lost. Then organizations must commit to reducing administrative load through automation, autonomy, workload management, continuous development, and on-demand support.

Before addressing skill development, measurement practices also need attention. Managers tend to optimize for metrics on which they are evaluated. If success is defined narrowly (sales results, CSAT scores, labor spend), behavior will follow.

A manager’s performance should reflect a balanced view of their everyday impact, including:

When people outcomes are elevated to the level of operational metrics, leadership becomes core to the job, not an extra task.

Once workflow and measurement are aligned, the company can clearly define what great management looks like in practice. The technical stuff is usually well documented and easy to standardize. Human skills require more intentional design and reinforcement because they show up uniquely in everyday moments.

These skills include:

Clear definitions for these skills create a shared standard. They help organizations identify right-fit candidates, develop managers more effectively, and build bench strength based on leadership capability rather than tenure or technical expertise alone.

Human skills take time to develop, especially for first-time managers navigating complex, high-pressure environments. Organizations cannot rely on the labor market to solve this problem by hiring fully formed leaders. Ongoing talent shortages and rapid role expansion make this unrealistic. Instead, organizations need a right-fit approach to management development that builds capability continuously.

Traditional leadership development models struggle with the reality that most managers are promoted to address immediate operational gaps. Multi-day programs, classroom sessions, and extended job shadowing require time managers simply do not have.

This is where L&D must shift from episodic programs to always-on enablement systems.

Rather than waiting until someone is in the role and overwhelmed, organizations can begin developing management capability earlier. Personalized learning systems can identify employees with leadership potential and recommend targeted skill development before promotion. These platforms also give senior management better visibility into who is interested in promotion and demonstrating the desired level of readiness, reducing reliance on subjective decisions.

Support cannot stop once a manager is in the role. The volume and pace of daily work make it difficult for managers to step away for lengthy development programs. Instead of expecting managers to figure things out on their own, L&D must embed support directly into the flow of work.

Effective enablement systems include:

This type of investment sends a cultural signal. It tells managers they aren’t expected to be perfect — to always have the right answer. Too often, asking for help can feel like admitting you don’t know how to do your job. This mindset isolates managers and slows development.

L&D can change this by normalizing learning out loud. When knowledge, practice, and collaboration are built into everyday systems, seeking help becomes part of the job rather than a personal risk. Managers are able to learn from one another, share expertise, and build confidence continuously, without waiting for the next formal program.

This shift, from training events to enablement systems, is how organizations scale management capability at the speed the business now demands.

Record quit rates during the early 2020s forced organizations to confront reality. Turnover was not driven by a single factor. While pay was high on the list, it was rarely the root cause. Burnout was more often to blame.

Employees left because workloads felt unsustainable. Expectations kept rising while resources shrank. Information was inconsistent or arrived too late to be useful. Performance goals shifted without context. Over time, this combination led to chronic stress, disengagement, declining performance, and ultimately attrition.

These pressures have not disappeared. They have normalized.

Managers sit at the center of this story. They shape workload, set priorities, interpret expectations, and turn strategy into performance every day. This makes managers the most powerful lever organizations have to reduce burnout, stabilize performance, and retain talent.

It also exposes a critical gap.

Many managers lack the skills, awareness, or authority needed to change the outcome. They are asked to protect their teams from burnout while operating inside systems that create it. Simply adding more responsibility to already stretched managers will not solve the problem.

This is where L&D must step up and challenge stakeholders to rethink what it truly takes to be a manager in today’s workplace. This includes shifting expectations away from pure output and toward people leadership. It means creating shared accountability for burnout rather than treating it as an individual manager failure. And it requires providing clear frameworks that equip managers to address human challenges like workload, motivation, trust, and recovery.

There’s a popular saying that “people leave managers, not jobs.” The deeper truth is that for most employees, the manager is the company. They are the most visible expression of organizational priorities and values. Their actions shape how work feels more than any corporate policy or executive message.

Organizations that want to compete for talent over the long term must start there. Investing in managers is not a luxury. It is a prerequisite. When managers are supported, skilled, and empowered to lead, people stay longer, perform better, adapt faster, and innovate more freely.

Thank you for everything you do. Let me know how I can help. Be well. JD

AI Statement: Every word in this post was written by the human author. AI was used to support research, ideation and editing throughout the creation process.