How to Design Effective Manager Development to Combat Burnout

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The only way to make sure that you have skilled management talent is to create an effective manager development program. It’s not just about ensuring your managers’ career development, or their managerial success—it’s also about driving business success and creating a culture of continuous improvement.

Without further ado, we’ll dive into how you can build effective managers for your business.

What is manager development?

Manager development is the continuous process of enhancing the key role-based capabilities of managers. Manager capabilities are made up of the skills, behaviours, knowledge, processes, and tools they need to perform their jobs, enabling them to meet business goals and deliver organisational outcomes.

The importance of effective management training

Up to 57% of people quit due to bad managers. That’s a lot, and with stats like that, it’s no wonder that manager development programs are so crucial to get right, lest employee turnover increase.

Effective management development training ensures that your managers are equipped with the necessary skills and knowledge to lead teams, support individual team members to drive performance, and achieve organisational goals. In short, it equips managers with the essential management skills they need to turn business strategy into business success and enable smooth business operations.

When managers master essential managerial skills:

• Strategic objectives are better communicated to employees, aligning teams with business goals and ensuring employees have a clear idea of what they should be doing and, crucially, why. This also increases employee engagement and motivation.
• Managers have improved analytical and critical thinking skills. That means they make more informed and effective decisions, leading to better resource management, process improvement, and cost savings.
• Change management becomes more efficient as managers are able to adapt to changes in the company and business environment. This might include adjusting to new technology, processes, or standards, or responding to business risks and challenges.

And let’s not forget the effect managers have on company culture. Managers set the standard for culture—which is why employee turnover driven by bad managers is so troubling. A skilled manager is better at conflict resolution and contributes to a healthier, more collaborative work environment. That means more engaged employees, better employee retention, and higher productivity. In fact, on average, effective managers make organisations 32% more productive.

Plus, effective manager training can really help businesses plan for the future in terms of talent development and succession planning. Management training isn’t just for managers themselves, but the high-potential employees (HiPo) who have the capacity to take on more senior roles in the future. It enables businesses to identify and develop future managers and leaders within the organisation, preparing them ahead of time so that the transition period is smooth for new managers and their teams.

How to identify key areas for manager development

If you want effective manager development, then you can’t just rely on generic development programs. The only way to ensure learning is effective is to marry it with performance management, because learning is pointless if it doesn’t drive performance improvement.

We advocate for linking learning and performance together because it solves two of your problems at once: Identifying areas for development, and providing truly relevant development initiatives to address those areas.

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

1. Define manager capabilities
2. Conduct a needs assessment
3. Evaluate priorities.

Define manager capabilities

Here’s the thing about capabilities: They’re derived from your business strategy. So, to define your manager-specific capabilities, you first need to ask:

• What role does it play in your organisation’s mission and what value does it create?
• How does it drive business outcomes? Is there demand for it in the market?
• What outcome do you want to see from the capability? (This will be the name of the capability so that everyone understands what the capability involves at a glance.)

Once you know how it fits into your business strategy, you need to determine the corresponding competencies. These are the proficiency levels used to measure how well the capability is currently being performed. The number of competency levels you have is up to you, but we generally suggest around five so you can cover your bases from a beginner to advanced level. Too few and you don’t really have enough data to measure anything accurately, but too many and you’re just getting lost in the sauce.

Consider a pattern like:

• Foundational   
• Intermediate  
• Adept/proficient  
• Advanced  
• Highly advanced/strategic.

Each level comes with a description of performance—or checklist, if you will. You can use this in performance management to accurately and objectively measure employees’ competency levels in their capabilities, as well as visualise where employee performance should be. Maybe you have an employee who is performing at an intermediate level, but due to future business needs, you really need them to be advanced.

If you already have capabilities defined and mapped to job roles, you can pass Go.

Conduct a needs assessment

Once you have your capabilities and competencies defined, you need to assess what your development needs are. These development needs will exist in the gaps between your current capabilities (aka those readily available and performed to standard in your workforce) and desired capabilities (those necessary for meeting goals), which you can find by performing a capability gap analysis.

This is the crux of effective performance management: Assessing current capabilities and then identifying development opportunities to bridge capability gaps. Measuring your current capabilities isn’t that hard—they’re tailored to your business, so each level of competency provides specific KPIs and metrics to measure performance against.

You can also measure current capabilities with capability assessments from different sources. These could be self-assessments done by the manager (or prospective manager), assessments performed by the managers’ supervisor, or even 360-degree feedback, which utilises a combination of feedback from peers, subordinates, and supervisors. Using a range of assessments creates the most objective overview of current capabilities, free from the bias that often plagues the performance review process. Not only that, but capabilities are objective to begin with, which is why they’re so important to use in performance management.

Evaluate priorities

We know it might be tempting to identify your gaps, conduct a training needs analysis, and then rush into closing those gaps all at once. But not all capability gaps needly to be as urgently closed as others.

Think about your business’s short-term and long-term plans. A small business may not have a sales team now, but in the long-term one may be needed as the company scales. So developing its sales capability probably won’t be a high priority now while there are still no sales team members. But in the short-term, the business may want to amp up brand awareness to make having a sales department worthwhile in future, and will need to focus on improving its marketing capability to do that. (Side note, sales and marketing are often complementary capability sets, so you can create long-term pathways that start to blend the two together or offer the sales capabilities as elective, interest capabilities for learners.)

One way to identify which capabilities are a high priority is with a business capability heat map. It visualises which capabilities are most crucial to develop based on their impact on the business (as well as the risk factor of not being developed).

The pitfalls of not training your managers

Managers are crucial to business success and employee performance, so you’re just cutting your business off at the knees if you don’t train them. It leads to a myriad of issues that can seriously stunt your organisation’s performance, culture, and workforce engagement.

Pitfall 1: Stunted organisational growth

Good manager training isn’t just about giving employees the tools to be great managers—it’s also about career development. It’s easy to promote high potential employees into management positions and call it a day, but being “high potential” alone isn’t enough to be a manager.

HiPos are often called “accidental managers” because their promotions are based on high performance or results or their natural leadership amongst peers. Being naturally gifted can mean they receive little manager training, so they aren’t equipped to:

• Innovate and adapt to changes in the business environment, hindering the organisation’s ability to adapt and grow.
• Identify and develop potential leaders, resulting in a weak leadership pipeline, poor succession planning, and missed opportunities for employee development.
• Properly support and guide direct reports, decreasing employee productivity and morale.

Not only does this hinder business success and employee development, but ill-equipped managers are more likely to burn themselves out attempting to perform a role they aren’t qualified for. Burnout negatively affects company culture and drives turnover among your managers.

Pitfall 2: Poor company culture

Managerial roles play a crucial hand in organisational culture and ensuring that said culture is positive and healthy. When managers lack essential skills, things can quickly spiral down-hill into toxic workplace territory.

Imagine this: A manager lacks strong communication skills. They don’t communicate strategy correctly, or give effective feedback, or even give their team members a clear idea of what they’re meant to be doing. Suddenly, there’s conflict and resentment within the team because they’re stepping on each others’ toes and don’t know how to improve what they’re doing without feedback, but their manager hasn’t got an in-depth understanding of conflict resolution, so the problems and toxicity persist.

It just snowballs out into bigger and bigger issues. It’ll start with employees checking out and losing motivation and engagement in their work, and it’ll end with higher employee turnover. A study from the Chartered Management Institute found that one in three managers and employees leave because of a negative work culture. Not only that, but a whopping 73% of employees don’t rate their managers as effective, and 50% of those employees plan to leave their organisations within the next year.

Pitfall 3: Business inefficiencies

Well-trained managers ensure operations run smoothly for the business, from implementing smoother processes, to making data-driven insights, to doing risk management that drives business success. But if managers are untrained then they’ll have poor decision-making skills and the lack problem-solving techniques to implement efficient processes—and that means time, money, and resources will be wasted on inefficient processes.

Not only does that negatively impact output, productivity, and the quality of work done, but it also runs the risk of confusing and frustrating the workforce, or worse: Burnout. If you can’t motivate employees (or they’re too burned out to perform efficiently) then they’re going to look elsewhere for work, and the cost of turnover and recruitment (on top of wasted resources and time) ruin’s the organisation’s bottom line.

Key takeaways

Managers are key to creating positive relationships and a healthy workplace culture. Without skilled managers, resentment, confusion, and workplace toxicity can drive employees away. When you have managers with a solid understanding of how to engage employees you’re more likely to see higher employee productivity and better business results.

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