How to ensure managers are ready for the spotlight

A manager is much more than just someone who oversees a team. Managers are the closest point of contact many employees have to leadership, making them a critical conduit to cross-collaboration and communications within a company. Additionally, upskilling these managers helps bring them in lockstep with company values as they improve both hard and soft skills. With that important role and duties, you’d think that investment in managers would be a top priority for most companies. According to a recent study out of the UK, that’s not the case.

The Chartered Management Institute surveyed 4,500 workers across the UK and found that a whopping 82% of managers were “accidental,” a term referring to management professionals without any prior training. Furthermore, 18% of managers report a lack of full confidence in their abilities to lead their teams. This is a major red flag in itself, but the report goes on to draw up the impacts on an undertrained manager’s reports.

Even within the subgroup of managers who are confident in their skills, a majority (60%) feel that more training would be helpful. There’s even a noticeable discrepancy between the confidence levels of managers who have been trained in their leadership abilities versus those without any training.

There’s a clear delineation between a manager who’s undertrained and not ready to lead and dissatisfied employees. While the natural (and correct) inclination is toward upskilling managers to build culture and retention, there’s a right way to make that happen.

The importance of upskilling for managers

Upskilling isn’t just important for managers taking on roles of authority on a team — they’re most effective when there’s an organizational commitment to building skill sets throughout the entire team. When upskilling, communications skills should be a critical part of any program, given the importance of managers at every level as part of a classic communications cascade. A manager who can accurately convey information to their team is worth their weight in gold.

There are a few things to keep in mind when you’re promoting upskilling to managers and other employees.

• Even if you have an upskilling program, you need to ensure managers know about it. If you don’t have avenues for managers to upskill, consider adding them. But if you do, are you communicating about them effectively? In a piece for Ragan last year, Lizz Summers, director of communications, rental division at Cintas shared that the simple act of pointing managers to upskilling offerings can help save the business time and money in the long run. “Turnover is expensive,” Summers said. “Inefficiency is expensive. But cohesive, useful, and connective communications can get organizations past that and drive everyone toward success. And in the end, isn’t a successful organization better for everyone?”
• Work to customize training offerings for the right roles and people. Leadership training that’s done in a vacuum isn’t going to be as successful as upskilling opportunities that use existing competencies and personality traits. In a conversation at Ragan’s 2024 Future of Communications Conference, Christina Thorsen, director of internal communications and mission marketing at Goodwill Central Texas, shared that offering a wide range of upskilling programs like emotional intelligence workshops helps combine both a manager’s hard skills and soft skills. She added that her team uses training tactics like trauma-informed management to assist upskilling employees in creating psychologically safe teams.
• Tie it all back to the business. Managers play a dual role as supervisors of their teams and two-way translators of information that trickles down from leadership to employees and feedback up from the employee level. Within manager training, communicators should be sure to include wording and reminders that a great manager has a critical role to play within the essential functions of the business. Think about upskilling as part of the larger group of responsibilities of the comms department – it’s on you as a comms pro to let managers know about these opportunities, and making that happen is key to overall business success. In addition, HR and communications should collaborate closely on internal upskilling opportunities and be sure to weave the company’s mission and values throughout.

No one is born a great manager — it’s a role that takes development and skill to fully master. But with the right training opportunities, organizations can help elevate managers from delegators and translators of corporate messaging to true leaders with an essential role to play.

Sean Devlin is an editor at Ragan Communications. In his spare time he enjoys Philly sports and hosting trivia.