How much do managers really matter?
Measuring 'managerial magnetism', and why even the best managers sometimes struggle.
In my last post for The L&D Dispatch, I wrote about how learning leaders are making ‘bets’ with their interventions, and can stack the deck in their favor. But what about after you’ve rolled out your intervention? You stacked the deck, but did you win?
For organisational problems where there’s a clear metric, you can look to see how that metric changed. Do sales reps book more meetings after you’ve delivered your workshop? Are there less faults in your products where teams are trained in continuous improvement?
Would that it was always so simple.
In reality, the line between intervention and impact is usually messier. And this is even more true when targeting generalist skills like management or coaching.
A manager in finance won’t be measured in the same way as a manager in sales, product, or customer service.
So how do we measure the impact of a management development program, when it’s rolled out to your entire management population?
One approach is to measure the impact of what my colleague Dr Anna Barnett refers to as ‘managerial magnetism’.
Managers play a key role in recruiting, building and retaining your workforce. These aspects of management are true, no matter the functional area. Which means we have something to measure.
But just how much impact do managers have?
In 2017, employee experience company Culture Amp examined their data and claimed that:
‘The number of employees choosing to leave an organization because of their manager could be as low as 12%.’
We’re not convinced this is right, given the many roles managers play in influencing an employee’s experience.
Last year, our Insights team performed a meta-analysis of research from Pew Research Center, Employ, CIPD, McKinsey, Betterworks, CIPD and TopCV, aggregated in our ‘Building Better Managers’ report.
Across studies, we see four key drivers of turnover, all of which managers influence to varying degrees.
💸 38% - Pay. When people feel underpaid, they look for work elsewhere. But managers of course influence what their teams are paid, can lobby for more pay, and play a role in setting expectations.
🏢 33% - Career. People want to progress in their careers and feel stifled when that doesn’t happen. But managers are key to identifying development opportunities, succession planning, and creating meaningful goals.
👹29% - Manager or culture. The most obvious link. When you work for a bad boss, it can infect every aspect of your life.
🧘🏼25% - Flexibility. Increasingly, employees expect to be able to work remotely, flex hours, and pop out during the day. Managers have a key role to play in shaping these policies and flexing them to their team’s context.
🔬 Measuring the impact of your management development
The key then is to look at those aspects of work most affected by managers, no matter their specialism:
Employee retention
Employee engagement
Employee moves and promotions
😱 But wait, it’s not all on the managers…
In 2025, Culture Amp revisited their original study. This time, they looked at data from 3 million employees in over 4,700 companies, with a focus on how those people rate ‘management’ and ‘leadership’.
Employees with a bad manager, who also thought their leadership team were terrible, had the worst employee experience. Obviously.
But what’s interesting is that great leaders seem to compensate for bad managers. Per the Culture Amp study:
‘Great leadership buffers the impact of a poor manager but not the other way around.’
Perhaps, when employees have a bad manager, they think it’s only temporary. They’re willing to stick it out. So long as they are proud to work for the company, motivated to go above-and-beyond, and would recommend the company as a place to work.
⚖️ What does this mean for measuring your management program?
It all comes back to understanding your organizational context. Your managers are key to driving performance, and it’s worth investing in them.
But, if their environment doesn’t allow people to perform, no amount of training is going to compensate for that.
So yes, invest in your managers. Focus on the skills that drive outcomes. But always start with the environment you’re asking them to lead in.
Need help building your leaders and managers? Or just want to chat or make a suggestion? Get in touch by emailing custom@mindtools.com or reply to this newsletter from your inbox.
🎧 On the podcast
Should we be adopting AI more into our day to day lives? How can L&D professionals move beyond reactive training on specific tools to cultivate a continuous learning mindset in team members?
In last week’s episode of The Mindtools L&D Podcast, Gemma and Dr Anna were joined by Head of L&D at Newsquest Media Group Mel Cooley to explore L&D’s relationship with AI.
They discussed:
how L&D is thinking and talking about AI;
what L&D can do to support AI integration;
how to measure the impact of AI.
Check out the episode below. 👇
You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify or the podcast page of our website.
📖 Deep dive — Manager Skills Framework (10 of 12)
In our tenth instalment exploring the 12 core skills in our Manager Skills Framework, we’re exploring active listening - the forgotten dimension of managerial communication.
In 1990, researcher John Fiske wrote:
“Communication is too often taken for granted when it should be taken to pieces.”
At work, we tend to think about communication in terms of emails, updates, announcements and instructions.
But how we receive information is at least as important as how we give it, with our understanding of another person’s message and experience having real consequences for people and teams.
There’s strong evidence to suggest that when managers are skilled at active listening, it positively influences employee wellbeing and performance. And the manager also experiences benefits.
In a qualitative study focusing on the experiences of senior, middle and front-line managers, Jonsdottir and Fridriksdottir (2019) report that one manager explained:
“I just generally feel better if I understand things better… then I feel I am in control… [I] know what is going on and I can make plans…”
Based on their interviews, the researchers determined that many managers are confident focusing their attention, reading nonverbal cues and asking questions. But they typically aren’t as strong at adapting their responses in ways that make the speaker feel genuinely heard.
For managers to really see the benefits of this skill, they don’t just need to listen but to ensure that the speaker feels heard.
Jonsdottir, I. J., & Fridriksdottir, K. (2019). Active listening: Is it the forgotten dimension in managerial communication? International Journal of Listening, 34(3), 178–188.
👹 Missing links
😲 The most common training method is, wait, WHAT?!
AI chatbots, Learning Experience Platforms, adaptive learning. Technology sure has come a long way. But as D'Angelo Barksdale said, ‘the King stay the King’. In Hemsley Fraser’s 2025 L&D Impact Survey, the top training method was… in-person training.
🤖 Is the talk of ‘reasoning’ AI overblown?
A new paper from researchers at Apple suggests that our favorite AI tools don’t reason as well as we might think. Although ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Claude and gang seem to be able to problem solve, it might be that they’re just really good at pattern recognition. When faced with challenges like ‘The Tower of Hanoi’, where disks are moved from one tower to another in a certain order, they soon get stuck and give up. Just like humans.
💾 Why AI literacy will go the way of the floppy disk
If you’re panicking about falling behind on understanding AI, you maybe don’t need to worry. As researcher Jason Lodge argues, the lesson of history is that technology gets easier to use over time. You don’t need to know programming, for example, to work a computer. Teaching humans to think like a machine is hard, and seems less and less useful as machines start to think like humans. I often think about Luke Skywalker, speaking to his robot mechanic R2-D2:
‘I'm hit, but not bad. Artoo, see what you can do with it.’
As a prompt for an AI, it’s pretty vague. But it’s probably a good model for what human-machine communication will become.
👋 And finally…
Following that subtle pivot to talking about Star Wars, here’s something fun to end with. His Obi-Wan is particularly good.
👍 Thanks!
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