The Manager Learning Crisis: Who Develops the People Developing Everyone Else?

22 October 2026

Managers shape the growth of everyone on their team, yet most have nobody shaping theirs. The numbers show it all; managers account for roughly 70% of the variance in team engagement scores, yet they’re expected to deliver results on their responsibilities and look after their juniors at the same time. In those cases, development reads like one more task on their plate unless something else comes off their workload first. Most of the time, managers would have to learn through hard mistakes before they get the hang of leadership, which just wastes time and efficiency. The fix to this is quite simple, and it starts with giving manager development a named owner, beginning with each manager’s own boss. This guest post from Rachita Sharma offers some thoughtful indights.

What Is the Manager Learning Crisis?

The manager learning crisis is the gap between how much responsibility managers carry for growing other people and how much growth they’re given themselves. Most managers who ended up in the role didn’t apply for a leadership track, so there was no training, no process of easing them into a leadership position. In some cases, they were good at their actual job, and that competence became the reason someone handed them their own team before being prepared to lead. Researchers call this an accidental manager, someone promoted for being excellent at their own work and not for being ready to run a team doing different things that they don’t usually do. And this happens more than you would suspect, with only 44% of managers worldwide having received formal training.

Why Are So Many Managers Learning Alone?

Part of the answer is in who gets chosen. Roughly one in ten people have the natural talent to manage well, and another two in ten could get there with the right coaching. Most companies aren’t selecting from either of these groups, but selecting for tenure. This would sometimes mean that the employees who’ve been in the organization for longer take a higher title, and those employees don’t have other mentors to learn management from. And in some cases, the title wasn’t earned, but waited out for.

Another part of it is structural. 41% of employees say that their companies have cut a layer of management in the past year. The average manager’s team has grown from 10.9 direct reports to 12.1 in a single year. They call this a structural flattening. It’s when 97% of managers are still doing their own work on top of managing others, and three in four HR chiefs share that their managers are overwhelmed. This leads us to assume that even the average manager won’t have the bandwidth to take on an intensive leadership development program, and at that point, it would have been too late anyways, as the title is already theirs.

The layer that used to absorb new managers and coach them through their first year in a senior managerial position is often the layer that gets cut by flattening. Nobody reassigned that job to anyone. Training, where it exists at all, usually happens once, right after the promotion, and then stops. This is what forces managers to learn their own leadership skills the hard way, through costly mistakes that would have never happened in the first place if they had the right training.

What Is This Costing Businesses?

Manager engagement has fallen from 31% in 2022 to 22% most recently, in 2025. This is a drop that erased what used to be called the engagement premium, the gap where managers were historically more invested in their work than the people they led. In a 2026 US poll, managers without any company-provided mental health support reported burnout at a 73% rate, compared with 45% among managers who had it.

But the price tag on this is very real. When managers burn out and eventually quit, take a sabbatical, or step back from the role, replacing them can cost roughly twice their annual salary. More than half the people who quit voluntarily express that their manager or company could have done something to prevent it in their exit interview. So no, it doesn’t get cheaper just by ignoring this issue. Addressing it takes an inside look at the company’s operations, asking the right, hard questions, and starting the process of investing in managers through the right development procedures.

How To and Who Should Develop Managers

Development needs a name attached to it. It’s not just one department’s sole responsibility. Who that name belongs to can change with headcount and funding, and even how much structure the organization already runs on. But “nobody in particular” is the wrong answer, always.

In a company with the resources to support it, that name should be the manager’s own manager, or their supervisor, made official. This might entail a standing, monthly conversation about how they’re approaching management responsibilities, not just what they’re delivering. HR departments should build the scaffolding around it, and a peer circle should be run alongside. Google ran exactly this kind of upward-feedback loop under Project Oxygen, and watched average manager scores climb from 83 to 88% in two years, with the weakest quartile of managers improving even more, from 70 to 77%. A training workshop won’t have the same, or equally strong, results. Senior leaders get held to a number on revenue when, in fact, they should be held to whether the managers reporting to them are getting better.

Developing Managers in Short-Staffed Startups

A startup consisting of ten people in their staff roster usually doesn’t have a manager’s manager at all. Just a founder, usually, already stretched across five other roles. The answer here still isn’t skipping development, but instead, making it cheap: peer coaching between the two or three managers who exist, a few paid hours a month with an outside coach, or a quarterly check-in treated as mandatory and unmissable.

Developing Managers in Nonprofit Organizations

Nonprofits usually carry the same thin bench as startups, but with two things startups don’t have, which are peer networks across similar mission-driven organizations and funders increasingly willing to earmark money for leadership capacity. Development doesn’t have to be built from nothing in these circumstances. It can be borrowed, through a coalition or a funder-backed workshop series.

Developing Managers in Government and Heavily Regulated Organizations

Here, the problem flips. There’s usually too much rigidity to rely on any one supervisor simply choosing to show up for their people. Civil service rules, procurement timelines, and job classifications mean ownership has to live in policy and not discretion. There needs to be a curriculum tied to promotion or an existing training academy, which would work better in these professional environments more than any informal mentoring relationship.

How Can Companies Develop Managers?

Choose your managers deliberately. Companies pick the wrong manager candidate roughly 82% of the time. To avoid that, test someone with a stretch assignment before handing them the title permanently. A stretch assignment will tell you more about someone’s leadership style and capabilities than an upfront interview.

Train the role early. More specifically, in the first 90 days when they first step into the role, and even before it. Set clear expectations, run a real shadowing opportunity with appropriate monthly check-ins. Skip the status updates and give feedback before a problem spirals into a pattern. Most companies skip straight to teaching performance-review software with the pretext of management training; the wrong move to make.

Coach the coach. Put a recurring conversation on the calendar between each manager and their own boss, focused on how they manage, not what they accomplished this month. On top of that, add a peer circle of four to six other managers who can support each other. Coaching-focused training like this can raise a manager’s own engagement by up to 22%, and their team’s by up to 18%.

Protect capacity. Cap how many people report to one person, and protect time that’s actually meant for developing people rather than approving deliverables. Manager quality is a bigger factor in how engaged a team is compared to the team’s size.

Measure and adjust. Run upward feedback from direct reports twice a year, and act on what comes back before the next round. A single annual survey tends to arrive too late to fix anything when the goal is catching drift while it’s still small.

Common Mistakes

• Promoting the top individual performer by default
• Treating training as a single event instead of an ongoing practice
• Leaving manager development entirely to HR
• Cutting a layer of management without moving the workload that came with it
• Measuring managers only on team output, never on how they lead
• Promoting someone suddenly, with no support during the transition
• Running training that has nothing to do with the manager’s actual day-to-day

None of these take a bigger budget to fix. All it takes is someone deciding to fix them and willing to make the changes to get there.

Conclusion

The question this started with was who develops the people developing everyone else. The answer is a name attached to the job: the manager’s own supervisor, backed by a real structure, whether that’s a formal monthly check-in at a large company or a quarterly one at a ten-person startup. Skip that ownership, and the cost shows up anyway, in disengaged teams and managers who quietly leave before anyone asks why. The cheapest fix is also the simplest one: put a recurring conversation about how a manager manages on the calendar, and protect it the way you’d protect a client meeting. Catching this early costs far less than untangling it after it’s already shaped how an entire team functions.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an accidental manager?

Someone promoted into management because they excelled at their previous job, not because they were trained or ready to lead people. The skills that earned the promotion rarely overlap with the skills the new role requires.

Why do so many managers struggle after promotion?

Most step into the role with no training, no reduced workload, and nobody checking in on how the transition is going. They’re learning to manage while still expected to perform like an individual contributor.

How much training do new managers need?

Enough to cover the first 90 days at minimum: setting expectations, running one-on-ones, and giving feedback. After that, ongoing coaching matters more than any single course.

What is a manager’s manager responsible for?

Holding a regular conversation about how the person below them manages, not just what their team delivers, and flagging problems before they show up in someone else’s exit interview.

How many direct reports is too many?

There’s no fixed number. Manager quality predicts engagement better than team size does, though spans much past ten tend to leave little room for meaningful coaching.

How do you measure manager effectiveness?

Upward feedback from direct reports, run at least twice a year, paired with team engagement scores tracked over time rather than a single snapshot.

Disclosure and Disclaimer

This is an independently written guest post. See our disclosure policy for details. The content on this site is provided for general information and educational purposes only. It is not intended as professional HR, employment law or occupational health advice. Statistics cited are drawn from third-party surveys and research, and employers’ obligations around training, workload and employee wellbeing vary by jurisdiction and change over time. UK readers should refer to current Acas guidance and the Health and Safety Executive’s Management Standards on work-related stress. US readers should note that employment and workplace wellbeing requirements vary by state. Readers should seek qualified professional advice for their specific situation. The Happy Manager and Apex Leadership Ltd accept no liability for actions taken in reliance on the content of this article.

Further Reading

• Taking Responsibility: Why UK plc Needs Better Managers — Chartered Management Institute: CMI and YouGov research with more than 4,500 UK workers and managers on “accidental managers”, training gaps and the cost of poor management. Read the report
• State of the Global Workplace — Gallup: Gallup’s annual global study of employee and manager engagement, including the recent decline in manager engagement. Read the report
• Span of Control: What’s the Optimal Team Size for Managers? — Gallup: Analysis of how team size affects manager engagement, and why manager talent matters as much as the number of direct reports. Read the article
• Management Standards: What to Do Next — Health and Safety Executive: UK guidance on developing the line manager competencies that prevent work-related stress, including HSE’s line manager competency indicator tool. Read the guidance

References

1. Gallup (2026). How Managers Impact Team Productivity (managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement; 44% of managers globally have received management training; manager engagement fell to 22% in 2025; wrong manager chosen 82% of the time; development linked to up to 22% higher manager and 18% higher team engagement). https://www.gallup.com/workplace/713033/managers-and-team-productivity.aspx
2. Gallup (2019). This Fixable Problem Costs U.S. Businesses $1 Trillion (more than half of voluntarily departing employees say their manager or organisation could have prevented them leaving). https://www.gallup.com/workplace/247391/fixable-problem-costs-businesses-trillion.aspx
3. Korn Ferry (2025). Workforce 2025: Power Shifts (41% of employees report a layer of management cut in the past year). https://www.kornferry.com/insights/featured-topics/workforce-management-articles/workforce-planning-insights/2025-power-shifts
4. Allwork.Space (2026). Managers Are Being Stretched Thin as Average Team Size Jumps to 12 Workers (average team grew from 10.9 to 12.1 direct reports; 97% of managers still carry their own workload). https://allwork.space/2026/01/managers-are-being-stretched-thin-as-average-team-size-jumps-to-12-workers/
5. Infopro Learning (n.d.). Leaders Are Quiet Cracking Too: Why They Stay but Fracture Internally (three in four HR chiefs say managers are overwhelmed). https://www.infoprolearning.com/blog/leaders-are-quiet-cracking-too-why-they-stay-but-fracture-internally/
6. NAMI (2026). 2026 NAMI/Ipsos Workplace Mental Health Poll (73% burnout among managers without company mental health support, against 45% with it). https://www.nami.org/research/publications-reports/survey-reports/2026-nami-ipsos-workplace-mental-health-poll/
7. World Economic Forum (n.d.). The 9 Habits of the Best Managers, According to Google’s HR Boss (Project Oxygen: average manager scores rose from 83% to 88%, and the lowest quartile from 70% to 77%). https://www.weforum.org/stories/leadership/the-9-habits-of-the-best-managers-according-to-googles-hr-boss/
8. business.caw.ac.uk (n.d.). The Rise of the Accidental Manager: Why It Matters and How to Get It Right (definition of the accidental manager). https://business.caw.ac.uk/blog/management/the-rise-of-the-accidental-manager-why-it-matters-and-how-to-get-it-right/
9. Scontrino-Powell (n.d.). Stretch Assignments That Develop Strategic, Interpersonal and Personal Skills (stretch assignments as a test of leadership readiness). https://scontrino-powell.com/blog/stretch-assignments-that-develop-strategic-interpersonal-and-personal-skills

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

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