Manager development is the ongoing process of equipping managers with the capabilities to effectively lead teams, build trust with their team members, communicate, make decisions, coach employees, manage performance, and adapt to changing organisational needs.
It’s also one of the best investments an organisation can make.
Gallup data has shown for some time now that about 70% of the variance in employee engagement comes down to the manager. Managers are also consistently one of the most cited reasons employees decide to leave a job.
Poor staff retention, low engagement, frequent absenteeism, interpersonal conflict, poor productivity are all problems that often trace back to the manager level.
Fix that, and you fix a surprising amount of what’s going wrong elsewhere.
However many organisations try, get frustrated when the same issues keep resurfacing, and conclude that the manager (or the training) just wasn’t good enough. Usually the issue is the approach: a single workshop or an occasional feedback session was never going to shift behaviour.
This guide walks through a few effective approaches built on being specific about what actually needs coaching, building self-awareness, and creating tailored support that’s consistent enough to produce real change.
Key Takeaways
- Diagnose the specific behaviour, not just the symptom.
- Start from a competency framework, then narrow to the role.
- Sort weaknesses into hard skill, soft skill, or cognitive ability.
- Build self-awareness first, before pushing for change.
- Replace occasional feedback with short, frequent check-ins.
- Understand the “why” behind resistance.
- Have a plan to support new managers from day 1.
1. Start by Naming the Actual Problem
The hardest part of manager development isn’t running the coaching, but rather figuring out what to coach in the first place.
It’s easy to spot the end result or problem, but harder to pin down the specific behaviour causing it.
In practice, I see the same patterns come up again and again.
Managers who:
- Don’t know how to motivate people
- Can’t have difficult conversations
- Have good people skills that disappear under pressure
- Complain about poor performers but struggle to give effective feedback
- Struggle to communicate (in a few different ways — more on this below)
- Are strong with people but weak on process and task management
- Apply one rule or strategy to every person and every situation, regardless of fit
A common example occurs in call centres with high escalation rates (employees frequently pass difficult calls up the chain of command for managers to handle).
The problem is not only the volume of escalations, but that managers often become frustrated because they don’t know how to change the pattern. They may repeatedly step in to solve problems, give generic advice, or apply the same approach to every employee.
Over time, this can leave managers feeling overwhelmed and ineffective, particularly when they are held accountable for problems they don’t feel equipped to resolve. That’s often less a reflection of effort and more a sign that their management style hasn’t adapted to the demands of the role.
Effective manager development requires identifying what the manager needs to do differently: whether that is coaching employees more effectively, setting clearer expectations, adapting their communication style, or building confidence in their team’s decision-making.
Before investing in developing a manager, be specific about the behaviour or capability gap that needs to change, not just the symptom you are seeing downstream.
2. Focus Carefully on What The Specific Management Job Needs
Gallup’s research identifies seven competencies necessary for success in any manager role:
- Build relationships
- Develop people
- Lead change
- Inspire others
- Think critically
- Communicate clearly
- Create accountability
This is a useful starting framework, but don’t stop there.
A lot of coaching time gets wasted on competencies that aren’t actually critical to the role in question, which just breeds frustration. The manager can tell their time isn’t being spent on something that matters, and disengages from the whole process.
Emotional Intelligence, for example, is one of the most commonly cited development areas, but it’s really an umbrella term covering many distinct traits: optimism, self-esteem, emotion regulation, impulse control, stress management, empathy, emotion perception, assertiveness, social awareness, adaptability, and more.
Telling a manager to “work on their EQ” gives them almost nothing to act on. The same applies to “good communication,” which is built on many elements, including emotional intelligence, personality, cognitive ability, and situational judgement.
How to apply this:
Before building a development plan, build a benchmark and map the specific role’s demands. A manager leading a high-pressure, fast-turnaround team needs different strengths (stress management, assertiveness, quick decision-making) than one leading a small team of senior specialists (relationship-building, delegation, patience).
Sit down with the manager’s actual day-to-day and identify which competencies are crucial to success in the role, and those that are not. This map becomes the backbone of a role-specific leadership skills profile, rather than a generic checklist applied to everyone regardless of what they actually do.
3. Pinpoint the Management Skills That Need to be Developed
Not all manager weaknesses are the same kind of problem, and mixing them up is a common reason development plans don’t work. Broadly, they fall into three categories:
- Hard skills — technical ability and job-specific knowledge.
- Soft skills — interpersonal and behavioural capability.
- Cognitive ability — the capacity to process information, reason, and solve problems.
Cognitive Ability
Cognitive ability is something that can be measured with cognitive ability tests, measuring factors like logical reasoning or verbal reasoning. Research has shown this to be a strong predictor of job success, but unlike the other factors, tends to be more static and difficult to develop.
Hard Skills
Hard skills are often the easiest to teach, and most organisations already have reasonably good systems for developing them. Technical knowledge, processes and role-specific capabilities are usually easier to define, measure and transfer through training and experience.
Soft Skills
Soft skills are where most manager development actually needs to happen. Google spent over a decade analysing what separated its great managers from the rest, and found that seven of the eight defining behaviours were people-focused, not technical. This is really where leadership skills are built. Soft skills are very flexible and can therefore can be developed, but generic training or workshops rarely help.
It takes a plan tailored to the individual’s specific strengths and limitations.
4. Help Your Managers Build Self-Awareness First
Self-awareness is one of the best places to start manager development, although it can also be a challenge to instill in someone who struggles with it. By definition, they can’t see the gap you’re trying to close.
Simple structured behaviour assessments like DISC can help a manager understand their natural behaviour style, how they tend to communicate, approach tasks, and interact with others.
It gives them a really helpful tool to understand how they naturally come across to others, and what they might need to adapt in their behaviour to see better results, which is often the first real step toward building trust with the people they lead.
Well researched and validated assessments measuring emotional intelligence like TEIQue can also be invaluable coaching tools.
It breaks down the various aspects of emotional intelligence, what this means in the workplace context, and a practical way to utilise strengths and focus on improving on limitations and weaker areas.
5. Maintain Frequent Check-ins and Feedback with Your Managers
Long gaps between feedback and coaching are one of the most reliable ways to kill a development plan.
A lot of organisations save manager feedback for a quarterly or annual review, by which point the specific moment that would have made the feedback useful is long gone.
Consistency matters. A short, regular check-in is always more useful than an occasional deep one.
How to apply this:
Set a fixed cadence. Weekly or fortnightly 30-minute check-ins work well for most managers; monthly is usually too infrequent, especially early on. Anchor each session to something specific and recent. A real meeting, decision, or conflict from the past week, rather than a general “how’s it going” conversation.
Specificity is what makes feedback actionable. Close every check-in with one concrete thing to try before the next one. Not a theme (“work on delegation”), but an action (“delegate the client follow-up to Sam this week and tell me how it went”).
Increase frequency for new managers. Someone in their first few months needs more support than someone five years in, even if their underlying skill gaps look similar on paper.
6. Be Prepared to Manage Resistance to Change
Some managers won’t want to be coached, and it’s worth figuring out why before assuming it’s just “stubbornness”.
Resistance usually comes from one of a few places:
They don’t see the problem.
If they can’t see the gap, feedback feels like an attack rather than useful information. This is where self-awareness work (above) needs to happen before you push a specific change.
They’ve tried before and it didn’t work.
If a past development effort was vague, poorly supported, or abandoned halfway through, they’ve reasonably concluded the process doesn’t work, not that they’re unable to change.
They don’t trust that it’s safe to be honest.
If admitting a weakness has previously been used against them (in a review, in a promotion decision), they’ll protect themselves by not engaging honestly.
The ask is too big and too vague.
“Be a better communicator” gives someone nothing to hold onto. Vagueness comes across as either indifference or a setup to fail.
How to apply this:
Don’t meet resistance with more pressure. That tends to entrench it further. Instead, start smaller than feels necessary: one specific, low-stakes behaviour, with a short timeframe and a clear reason tied to something the manager actually cares about (their team’s results, their own stress levels, a goal they’ve stated themselves). The goal at this stage is to help managers rebuild trust in the process itself, not to force compliance with it.
Chris has over 30 years of experience as a senior manager and entrepreneur in Human Capital and people management. He has worked extensively with psychometric assessments and pre-employment testing, helping organisations hire the right people and build strong teams.