Ask any L&D team what their managers need and you’ll get a long list. Ask the managers when they’ll find the time and you’ll get a tired laugh.
Both are right. Manager development keeps coming top of HR priorities, and managers keep getting busier. The question isn’t whether managers need development. It’s how you give it to people who are already at capacity.
How stretched are managers?
Very, and the evidence is consistent.
In Gartner’s 2024 survey, three-quarters of HR leaders said their managers were overwhelmed by growing responsibilities. By late 2025, 47% of managers told Gartner they were working harder than a year before. In the UK, only six in ten managers say they have the time to manage people well.
Part of the problem is where the time goes. McKinsey found middle managers spend nearly half their time on work that isn’t management at all, and less than a third on managing people. The people part of the job is the part that gets squeezed.
Why doesn’t another programme fix it?
Because it adds to the load it’s meant to help with.
When a manager is already behind, a day out for training means a day of catching up. So they attend, they mean well, and they go back to a full inbox. The good intentions rarely survive the first week.
Gartner’s research points the same way: traditional seminars and lectures didn’t help, and it recommends repeated connection over one-off events. And transfer research shows that for leadership skills in particular, what happens back at work matters even more than it does for technical training.
There’s an honest limit here too. If a manager’s role has become unmanageable, no development approach will fix that. That’s a job design problem, and it needs a different conversation.
Where is the room for development?
Inside the management work managers already do.
Every manager already has one-to-ones, team meetings, updates, decisions and difficult conversations. Those moments are where people experience their manager, and where trust is gained or lost. They’re also the best place for a manager to practise.
So don’t ask “how do we fit development in?” Ask “which of the moments a manager already has could they handle a little differently?”
What does that look like in practice?
One behaviour, attached to a moment that’s already in the diary.
- Choose one behaviour. Not a competency framework. One thing, like flagging a risk early or checking understanding before responding. Choosing one keeps it doable and makes it noticeable.
- Tie it to a routine. “In Thursday’s one-to-one with Sam, I’ll ask what’s getting in the way before I give my view.” Research on planning when, where and how to act shows that naming the moment makes follow-through much more likely.
- Keep the prompt short. A few minutes to set the intention is enough. The practice happens in the meeting that was happening anyway.
- Record what happened. A quick note afterwards: what I did, how they responded, what I’d do next time.
- Repeat it. Gallup’s research suggests frequent short conversations do more than occasional long ones. The same logic applies to practice.
None of this needs a day away. The development and the management are the same activity.
Why start with trust?
Because trust is what the management moments are built on.
Research across more than a hundred studies found trust in leaders is linked to how people feel about their work and how well they do it, with the direct supervisor standing out as especially important. In the UK, 91% of employees whose manager respects them say they achieve their job objectives, compared with 75% of those who don’t feel respected.
When I was an operational manager, the moments that mattered were rarely the big ones. They were whether I did what I said, whether I warned people early, and whether I listened before deciding. Those are behaviours a manager can practise in any one-to-one. The people they manage feel the difference before anyone runs a survey.
What should L&D do differently?
Design for the diary managers already have, not the one you wish they had.
That means short prompts instead of long modules, practice in real meetings instead of role-plays, and a simple record that shows what changed. It also means asking managers for less of their time and more of their attention. Most managers can find five minutes before a one-to-one. Very few can find a day.
Develop them in the work, and the work stops being the reason they can’t develop.