How to Design Effective Manager Development to Combat Burnout

This article first appeared on Acorn Labs in June 2024.

For a more in-depth look at manager development, have a read of the full article.

Manager development is the continuous process of enhancing managers’ key role-based capabilities, enabling them to meet business goals and deliver organizational outcomes.

The importance of effective management training

Up to 57% of people quit due to bad managers, so it’s crucial to get manager development right, lest employee turnover increase. Especially because managers have a direct effect on workplace culture.

Effective management development training equips managers with the essential management skills they need to turn business strategy into business success. For example:

• Strategic objectives are better communicated to employees, aligning teams with business goals
• Managers have better analytical and critical thinking skills, allowing them to make more informed and effective decisions
• Change management becomes more efficient as managers can adapt to changes in the company and business environment.

How to identify key areas for manager development

There are three key steps to identifying opportunities for manager development.

1. Define manager capabilities

Capabilities are derived from business strategy, so you need to understand:

• What role the capability plays in your organisation’s mission and what value it creates.
• How it drives business outcomes and whether there is market demand for it.
• What outcome you want from the capability.

Then you can determine corresponding levels of competency to measure how well the capability is being performed. How many you have is up to you, but we recommend they cover your bases from beginner to advanced competency (beginner being “needs development” and advanced being “exceeds expectations”).

2. Conduct a needs assessment

Assess what your development needs are with a capability gap analysis. Development needs are the gaps between your current capabilities (aka the capabilities readily performed and available to your workforce now) and desired capabilities (the capabilities required to meet goals).

Using the capability’s competency levels as a guide to measure capability gaps makes it easier to identify development opportunities and the specific KPIs to bridge gaps. We recommend using capability assessments from different sources to get the most objective view of competence.

• Self-assessments are performed by managers assessing themselves. People generally have a good idea of what they’re capable of, but self-assessments can be open to overly harsh or overly positive bias.
• Manager assessments or 360-degree feedback are performed by the managers’ supervisor or peers and subordinates. Supervisors have a clearer idea of how manager capabilities link to business strategy, and peers and subordinates provide a good window into how good managers are at actually managing people.
• Subject matter expert assessments are done by subject matter experts for specialist manager capability sets.

3. Evaluate priorities

Don’t conduct a training needs analysis and then rush to bridge all your capability gaps at once just because you’ve identified them. The fact is not all capability gaps need to be as urgently closed as others.

Consider your business’s long- and short-term plans. In the long-term you may need to add a sales team, but developing sales capability isn’t a priority while there are no sales team members. In the short-term, the business may want to increase brand awareness to make a future sales department worth it, and will need to improve its marketing capability.

Categorize your capabilities in terms of priority with a business capability heat map. It visualizes which capabilities are most crucial to develop and which are less urgent. The level of urgency is determined by the capability’s impact on the business—that is, the risk not developing the capability poses to the organization.

The pitfalls of not training managers

Managers are crucial for business success and employee performance, so you’re just cutting your business off at the knees if you don’t train them. There are several issues that can seriously stunt your organization if you don’t develop managers you’ll see:

1. Stunted organizational growth. They’ll be unable to innovate and adapt to changes in the business environment, identify and develop potential leaders (which leads to poor succession planning and stagnant career progression), or properly support direct reports. Underdeveloped managers will burn out faster as they struggle with their role.
2. Poor company culture. Managers model desired company culture, but if they can’t communicate or give feedback effectively, conflict and resentment will build within the team. Not only that, but if managers can’t effectively facilitate conflict resolution then those resentments will continue to fester and drive employee turnover.
3. Business inefficiencies. Well-trained managers ensure operations just smoothly, but underdeveloped managers lack the decision-making and problem-solving skills needed to implement efficient processes (or course-correct when problems arise). That means wasted time, money, and resources.