Five Essential Elements of Modern Manager Development
Organizations pour hundreds of billions of dollars into manager development each year, yet most solutions fall short of meeting all of their promises. Seeking to understand this pervasive dilemma, the Humancore team spent months listening to hundreds of managers and L&D leaders about the biggest challenges they face – and their aspirations for greater performance and efficiency. In this article, we'll explore five essential criteria for evaluating manager development solutions that actually drive performance.
The Modern Manager's Dilemma
Today's managers face an unprecedented convergence of pressures that challenge their ability to be effective leaders. As organizations pursue efficiency, many have significantly reduced managerial headcount while simultaneously expanding the scope of remaining managers' responsibilities. Recent data from Gallup shows that 64% of organizations added new job responsibilities to their managers' roles in 2023 alone, ranging from supporting employee mental health to implementing return-to-office mandates.
At the same time, the impact of manager effectiveness on business outcomes remains significant: Gartner's research indicates that employees working under ineffective managers are 15 times more likely to be low performers, 13% less engaged, and three times more likely to leave their organizations. Despite this critical importance, managers are feeling more pressure and less supported than ever before. Team leaders are now more likely than non-managers to be disengaged, burnt out, and actively job hunting.
The Limitations of Current Development Solutions
Today's organizations have invested countless budget dollars and resources in a wide range of learning & development solutions, from traditional learning management systems and workshops to learning courses and professional coaching. More recently, managers and employees alike have been turning to generic generative AI chatbots in search of real-time advice and ideas.
While these programs and approaches have in some cases resulted in incremental improvements in performance and growth, they have on the whole failed to meet the elevated needs of today's managers. Let's examine how current solutions fall short across several critical dimensions:
Disconnect from Daily Realities
Consider the daily life of today's manager: they're constantly switching between tasks, handling unexpected challenges, and making decisions that impact their teams in real-time. Yet traditional corporate training platforms and workshops operate entirely outside this flow, requiring managers to step away from their actual work to engage in theoretical learning. Professional coaching is much the same. Even generic AI chatbots – while always available – lack the real-world context to provide truly relevant guidance for specific workplace situations.
Time and Resource Constraints
This disconnect from workplace reality is further compounded by managers’ severe time constraints. Research indicates the average employee has less than 25 minutes per week for designated learning, yet current solutions expect that managers can dedicate substantial blocks of time to development. Learning Management Systems require completion of lengthy courses, some lasting many hours or even days at a time, while coaching sessions demand precious calendar space that many simply don't have or are unwilling to create. And while AI tools may provide instant responses, managers often spend more time trying to adapt their generic advice to make it most valuable to their given situation.
Limited Practical Application, Lacking Much-Needed Advice
Through our months-long listening tour, we’ve discovered that current solutions fail to deliver what managers need most: direct, actionable advice relevant to immediate challenges. This hunger for direct, actionable advice is especially intense in managerial roles, where quick decisions can ripple through entire teams. These decisions ultimately determine the success or failure of major initiatives, organizational performance, and the customer experience.
In this way, the standard array of development tools available fall short. Traditional L&D programs offer theoretical frameworks but often struggle to connect them to specific situations and to company context. Coaching's guidance-oriented approach explicitly avoids giving direct advice, while AI tools may provide inappropriate recommendations pulled from unreliable sources. This leaves managers without clear direction in crucial moments where hesitation isn't an option.
In search of advice, managers often find themselves turning to others in their organization or network of friends and former coworkers for support. Yet finding the right human advisor in real time presents its own maze of challenges. A boss might be unavailable, or, equally as likely, might be the source of the problem one is trying to solve. Peers could have conflicts of interest and are often biased in the advice-seeker's favor. Even professional coaches, while valuable, typically aren't readily available when needed most and aren't positioned to offer contextualized recommendations.
This creates a persistent tension: managers desperately need good advice in real time, but the traditional sources of guidance can each make getting that advice surprisingly difficult.
Five Essential Elements of Modern Manager Development
As we navigate this next chapter in corporate history, organizations need to take an even more intentional approach to manager development. In order to provide the support today’s managers are desperately seeking, L&D leaders should take into account five crucial solution requirements:
1. Personal Relevance
Development approaches must account for each manager's unique combination of experiences, capabilities, and personality traits. The most effective solutions incorporate understanding of team dynamics and individual employee tendencies, ensuring advice is meaningful and applicable to specific situations.
2. Time Efficiency
Modern solutions must work within managers' existing workflows, providing support exactly when needed without requiring additional time commitments. This often means moving away from scheduled sessions and lengthy courses toward just-in-time learning and support.
3. Synchronized Problem-Solving
Rather than separating learning from doing, effective solutions must integrate development with real-world problem-solving. This means providing specific, actionable advice for immediate challenges while simultaneously supporting long-term capability development. According to Gartner, this type of contextual learning can boost performance by 35%.
4. Company Context
Company context elevates manager development solutions from abstract theory to practical application by anchoring learning in real organizational challenges and culture. This helps managers square real-time challenges with ongoing company needs and realities, boosting the relevance of solutions and accelerating team time-to-performance.
5. Expert by Design
Expert research and knowledge provide a crucial evidence-based foundation for manager development, ensuring that learning solutions are grounded in proven principles rather than assumptions or trends. By drawing from high-quality academic studies and field-tested frameworks, these programs can target the skills and behaviors that demonstrably impact team performance and organizational success, while avoiding common leadership pitfalls.
Based on our research, all five of these principles must be fully addressed when implementing manager development solutions moving forward. Organizations that implement solutions incorporating these elements can expect to see concrete improvements in manager capabilities and performance, decision-making abilities, and team outcomes. Given that relationships with management are the top factor in employee job satisfaction, investing in effective manager development tools will have far-reaching effects on engagement, retention, and productivity across the enterprise.
Ready to transform how your managers perform and grow? Humancore has created the first AI-powered advisor for managers. To learn more about how an AI-powered advisor can transform your organization's approach to manager development, contact us today at [email protected].
