Why Your Management Training May Not be Working (and How to Fix It)

When we first started Kommon, we spoke to lots of managers about how comfortable they felt in the role and about the support they were getting from their companies.

Reassuringly, or so we thought, we found that 70% were getting some assistance, usually in the form of management training. 

Less reassuringly, over 80% of those respondents said that it wasn’t actually helping.  

And it’s not just managers who realise there’s a problem.

We’ve spoken to many People/HR professionals tasked with organising training who are privately aware that their solutions aren’t having the results they want, but are struggling to find the right fix. 

We wanted to write a piece reflecting on some of these conversations, identifying the issues, and presenting some of the best practices we’ve seen work in successful companies.

If you’re a manager trying to advocate for better support, or one of those trying to provide that support, this article’s for you.

Solving the Right Problem

‘If someone thinks that you are a future star of the company and you get sent away on training... I don’t want to turn around and be like, guys, this is a waste of money.’ Kommon Manager Interview

Management training is a means rather than an end.

That should be obvious but too often it seems like ‘doing some management training’ becomes the organisational objective rather than the actual result you’re trying to achieve. 

If we go back to the result you’re after, we imagine it’s broadly something like:

‘Helping managers get better at their jobs’

So far so good.

But do you actually know what your managers’ challenges are and what would help them get better? When you dig into it, they might be things that can’t be fixed by training.  

Here’s several examples of typical structural issues which no amount of training is going to solve (but which hinder managers all the time):

• Lack of time to manage due to overwork: managers may want to spend more time planning their 1:1s, working with team members on development areas, discussing career paths and thinking about how they can be a better boss… but can’t due to the sheer volume of their other work.  

• Too many direct reports: in some cases overwork is created due to having too many people to manage, with managers spread too thin to be able to adequately support each team member.  Kim Scott suggests that managers’ 1:1s act as a natural bottleneck on direct reports.  Managers should be able to meet all their reports for a good weekly/fortnightly 1:1.  If they can’t do that, they’ve got too many. 

• Underperformance due to poor hiring: underperforming employees create some of the largest time burdens on managers - they require additional attention to improve, and take away resources from other team members.  Managing underperformance is a key part of any manager’s role, but only to the point that there’s the possibility of an employee reaching the required level.  Sometimes that’s not possible, because the wrong person was hired in the first place, and no amount of great management is going to fix their unsuitabilty for the role.  

• Demotivational performance processes: it’s hard for managers to motivate high performing teams when that performance isn’t rewarded.  Or as happens in many cases, it’s rewarded inconsistently through onerous and artificial processes which hinder rather than help managers to do their jobs.

• Lack of organisational clarity: managers can’t orient their teams to do their most impactful work for a company if they’re not clear what success looks like.  A lack of clarity in communication from senior leadership can quickly undermine managers’ best efforts as they waste time second guessing what their bosses want.

• Lack of guidance on progression: most managers are motivated to a significant degree by the desire to help their people develop and grow (and this improved performance also has obvious benefits to the organisation).  But if it’s not clear how an individual can progress in a company (e.g. through a lack of formal career development paths) then again managers are left guessing as to how they should direct their teams.

• Promotion of unsuitable managers: we’ve all seen the ‘wrong’ people get promoted into management positions, often due to a lack of other senior career pathways.   These individuals often have neither the skills nor motivation to be great at the job.  Good luck training for that.

There are others we haven’t mentioned, and you can probably think of some which have come up in discussion at your company.

Good training increases people’s capabilities.  But if those capabilities then butt up against organisational issues like these, you’re not going to achieve the impact you want. 

Put another way, if structural issues exist, pushing responsibility for fixing the symptoms onto individual managers by sending them a LinkedIn Learning course on ‘Giving Better Feedback’ isn’t going to help. 

So before thinking about training, make sure you’re clear on the core question:

‘How can we best help our managers improve at their jobs’

If you don’t know the answer to this, ask your teams. 

Speaking to your Teams

‘I also had some training recently about people returning to work, which was hilarious because it was on the day that I was due to have off to help me return to work’  Kommon Manager Interview

Your people are the key to understanding how to shape any management training program.

A few structured conversations can yield invaluable insights which will help you understand where the challenges are in helping your managers succeed in the role.

If you’re considering doing this, here’s a few tips:

• Target: unless you’re a small org, you’re not going to be able to speak to everyone for this exercise, you’re going to have to choose who to speak to.  Target your conversations on the areas where improvement would have the most impact.  You probably have informal signals to suggest you’ve got issues with, for example, new manager transitions, or senior leaders losing experienced hires.  Pick a management issue to focus on and speak to the relevant people about it.

• Team: we say ‘team’ because you won’t just be speaking to managers.  Whilst managers will have a view on the areas they find challenging and want to improve, you’ll get just as much (if not more) information from speaking to their team members about what they want to see more of from their bosses. 

• Topics: you’ll want to gather information on several subjects - from how comfortable managers feel in the role, to the support they get, to how effective they think those solutions are (you can find some suggested questions below).

• Talk: there’s a temptation with these exercises to use a survey to gather anonymous responses.  Whilst this can be a useful tool, and you may wish to use it, we’d always recommend talking to your teams too.  1) You’ll gain valuable information you wouldn’t get through a survey 2) it demonstrates your investment in tackling the issues 3) you bring people into the process who can be internal champions for your eventual solution.

• Trust: some of the questions you’ll be asking will invite potentially critical responses of other employees - you’ll need to make sure whoever is conducting the interviews (or any surveys) has the confidence of the interviewee to maximise honest answers. For example, getting HR to ask managers what they thought of the management training HR just organized, or asking bosses to speak to their team members about what they think of them, is unlikely to generate full and frank answers.

Finding the Right Solutions

‘My organisation has some online manager training and has access to LinkedIn Learning. Do I have time to do those online courses, though? The answer is no.’  Kommon Manager Interview

‘What really stuck with me was talking through specific problems with those who knew my situation but weren’t directly involved in it’ Kommon Manager Interview

By this point you should have a good idea of how you can best help your managers improve at their jobs.  

You’re probably aware of some structural issues, but have also identified some capability gaps that you want to fill.

So finally, training? Well, maybe…

Different people learn in different ways.  The most successful manager development programs often include a range of options to give managers the best chance of finding a learning opportunity that works for them - for example, a format that resonates, or often just one which fits in with their pattern of work.

So rather than narrowing your focus down to formal training, we wanted to present a range of manager development approaches and their use cases.  Based on what you heard from your teams, and the challenges you’re having, we’ll leave you to pick which items from the menu best suit your company.  

The answer probably still includes training, but we bet you see a couple of other things you can layer in too which will dramatically improve your approach to manager development and leverage any training you decide to do.

• Training: the one you came to this article to actually read about! By now you should have a wealth of information to judge what training will be most effective - which topics people want covered, which formats they would find most useful etc.  If you’re using an external trainer, find one which will be most familiar with the context of your company and your growth to make sure it’s most relevant for your teams.

• Peer learning groups: the people who know most about the difficult situations managers will face at your company are your people.  Organising sessions for peers to share their experience of management, and discuss them, will highlight issues others are likely to face ahead of time in an informal and engaging way.  You can read more about peer learning groups here.

• Buddying: some people won’t be comfortable sharing their management experience in a group forum, in which case pairing them up with a peer manager to meet 1:1 may be more effective.  Again, the intention is to meet up every few weeks to talk through any challenges and successes with a peer who’s also experiencing the same role.

• Mentoring: if peer groups and buddying are about learning from others going through the same experience of management, mentoring is about learning from those who’ve already been through it.  The opportunity to ask a more experienced manager about the role can be invaluable, and management mentoring programs can be very effective.

• Community building: one of the challenges of manager development is consolidating learning within your company and sharing useful experience as broadly as possible.  Whilst peer learning groups are helpful, you can broaden this out even further by creating a manager community across your company.  We’ve seen companies serve these manager communities with specific Slack channels, events, knowledge sharing, and even dedicated monthly newsletters.  Not only does this help managers develop but it sends a powerful message that good management is a skill that’s valued within your company.

• Tooling: you’ve probably read various statistics about how easily training is forgotten.  If your managers don’t put what they’ve learned into practice soon, and often, it will fade away.  Your managers are also likely to be some of the busiest people in your company, and integrating new habits into their schedules will be challenging, even with the best intentions.  Specialised tools like Kommon help managers make these changes, integrate best practice into their work, and more effectively manage their teams.  Learn more here about how.