More often than not, managers are set up to fail.
Companies choose the wrong candidate for management 82% of the time, according to Gallup. And given managers account for around 70% of engagement across the organisation, with disengagement costing the UK nearly £340 billion a year, it becomes a costly problem.
Aside from the obvious issues of micromanagement, team bias, and creating toxic work cultures, poor management also has a significant knock-on effect on the quality of L&D.
Rather than serving as core partners in the learning experience for employees, and helping the company achieve the capabilities it needs to achieve competitive advantage, many managers can become blockers to continuous improvement.
Whether managers are too busy, lack the skills themselves to help, or simply do not care enough to push their team to improve, this can kill employee engagement and L&D investment in equal measure.
Companies have to take the time to support line managers by creating a culture of learning and giving them the skills to help employees who are seeking personal growth and development.
The L&D-manager link
Managers bring HR to life in the organisation. This is true for organisational development processes, benefits and recognition policies, or performance management practices.
And it’s certainly true for L&D, where managers are both responsible for on-the-job training – which makes up a significant proportion of L&D under models such as the 70:20:10 framework – and for connecting employees with other learning opportunities.
CIPD’s Professionalising Learning and Development report found that close to 80% of L&D professionals believe that line managers are blocking better solutions to improve organisational performance.
We can have the best strategy in the world but if employees don’t have sufficient time to engage with our efforts, it’s all for nothing
By selecting the right managers, and training managers to coach and facilitate learning for employees, L&D leaders can push far greater adoption of the learning processes they roll out.