Leadership
Manager Capability Is the Multiplier
Much of the success of an organisation's investment in strategy, technology and change depends on a group of people who are sometimes expected to work everything out for themselves.
Organisations invest heavily in strategy, technology, culture, employee engagement and transformation, but much of the success of those investments ultimately depends on a group of people who are sometimes expected to work everything out for themselves.
Those people are managers.
For most employees, the organisation isn't experienced through the strategic plan or the presentation given by the CEO. Their experience is shaped much more directly by the work they do, the expectations placed on them and the person responsible for managing them.
That gives managers an enormous influence on organisational performance.
We ask a lot of managers
Consider what a typical manager may be expected to handle.
They have to communicate organisational priorities, set expectations, allocate work, manage performance, develop people, deal with difficult conversations, implement change, solve problems and maintain standards. At the same time, many still carry significant operational responsibilities of their own.
It is a demanding role, particularly when somebody has been promoted into management because they were excellent at something else.
The strongest engineer may become the engineering manager. A successful salesperson becomes responsible for the sales team. An experienced clinician takes responsibility for colleagues.
Their technical credibility remains valuable, but the nature of their contribution has changed.
Someone who was previously expected to solve a problem personally now needs to help other people solve problems. Someone responsible for their own performance is suddenly responsible for creating the conditions in which other people can perform.
Organisations don't always recognise how significant that transition can be.
Managers amplify what is happening elsewhere
A clear strategy handled by capable managers can become clearer for employees. An unclear one can become even more confusing.
The same applies to culture, change and performance. Managers can reinforce the behaviours an organisation says it values, or quietly tolerate completely different ones. They can make a change initiative relevant to their team or allow it to become something employees wait to disappear.
This is why we think of management capability as a multiplier. Its impact extends far beyond the individual manager.
A large part of management is creating clarity
Many workplace frustrations are ultimately connected with uncertainty.
People don't know who owns something, which priority matters most, whether they are allowed to make a decision, what their manager expects or how well they are actually performing.
Good managers reduce unnecessary uncertainty.
They help people understand priorities, responsibilities, standards and the boundaries within which they can act. That doesn't mean telling people exactly what to do all the time. In fact, greater clarity often gives employees more freedom because they understand where they can use their own judgement.
Development has to make sense in the real job
Over the last 25 years, we have delivered leadership and management development in very different environments, from aviation and healthcare to universities, professional services and growing SMEs.
The context changes enormously, but one lesson has remained consistent.
People engage with management development differently when they can connect it with something they genuinely need to handle at work.
A difficult employee conversation, a customer issue, a decision they have been avoiding or a problem within their team provides a much richer environment for learning than management theory on its own.
That is why we have always believed development should help people become better at the actual job of managing, rather than simply becoming more knowledgeable about management.
Our perspective
There is plenty of leadership theory available to organisations. The more useful question is whether managers can lead effectively in the environment in which they actually work.
Can they create clarity, make appropriate decisions, develop people and have useful conversations about performance? Can they translate organisational priorities into something their team understands? Can they take responsibility without escalating everything upwards?
Improving those capabilities changes more than the manager. It influences the performance of the people around them, which is why getting management capability right can have such a disproportionate effect on the organisation as a whole.