How to measure the impact of investing in managers 

Article written by Farley Thomas, Co-Founder & CEO of Manageable  

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‘Impact’ has become something of a buzzword in corporate circles; no new initiative can be floated or considered without a clear impact and ROI.  

And that’s fair, because businesses can’t waste their resources on programmes that don’t deliver. At the same time, however, the importance of delivering impact has created space for impact measures that look good on paper but are just designed to get the business case signed off.  

We know these as ‘vanity metrics’ and they can seem impressive on the surface: a 28% increase in this or a 76% decrease in that. 

Once signed off, however, little effort is expended to realise these benefits and measure the actual return on investment. We can understand why — doing so takes time and yet more investment of effort. And then there’s the somewhat edgy point that each year the main cost to the business is the total cost of employment. Let’s call that 100%. This is, strictly speaking, an investment each year by the business and yet we haven’t seen much rigour in the impact and ROI of this huge cost. Instead, the focus is on the cost of upskilling or reskilling people despite these costs being a fraction of the total cost of employment and, ironically, a means to actually achieving a return on the original investment in people in the first place. 

If we look at management training, what we advocate is for businesses to train their eye on the true measures of positive change: the impact of the training on a manager’s team or colleagues, the participants of the training (managers themselves and how they change for the better), employee engagement data, and sponsor satisfaction. 

The Four-Eyes Impact Model 

At Manageable, we help our clients implement a four-factor impact model outlined above when training managers with coaching skills.  

#1 Colleagues 

What, if anything, is changing in the lives of those managed by the leaders we’re training? What benefits are they receiving from the manager-employee relationship now versus in the past?  

We recommend measuring six behaviours on a ‘never to always’ scale before, during, and after investing in manager training: 

• Care – Is your manager sensitive to your feelings? Do they demonstrate care and responsibility for the well-being of others? 

• Curiosity – Does your manager actively seek insights and knowledge about others? Do they show great curiosity in what you think, feel, or want to do? 

• Candour – Does your manager give excellent feedback — with courageous candour — that helps you learn and grow? 

• Connectivity – Is your manager fully present in 1-1 meetings and pays attention to you? Do they create connections between people, ideas, and practices? 

• Change enablement – Does your manager support your growth and the growth of your colleagues? Are they willing to help others in their development? 

• Coachability – … and do they show a willingness to grow and develop themselves? 

 Given how important these six factors are for leadership effectiveness, we have developed a psychometric assessment of these six factors, allowing companies to measure the leadership capacity in their organisations at an individual and organisational level. 

#2 Participants (the managers themselves) 

Businesses need to capture meaningful self-reported data from training participants.  

How confident is the manager feeling before, during, and after the training? How ready are they to take their new skills into the workplace? Have they had time to explore and experiment with using their coaching skills in real scenarios with team members, rather than just in role-play — and what did they learn doing so? 

Interestingly, studies have found that asking participants to state their confidence in the programme’s success before getting started can positively influence impact. Asking them to confirm their buy-in to the learning experience and its expected benefits somehow commits them to its success. 

#3 Proxies 

Almost all organisations gather data that can be used as a proxy for the impact of training. Employee engagement data, for example, through employee surveys, absenteeism and retention rates, employer brand perception, and so on.  

So how can this be useful to measure the impact of manager training? 

Investing in managers is about accelerating the good things and not exacerbating the bad. You’ll want to see employee retention increase and attrition decrease. You’ll want employees to report that they feel happier and more satisfied in their roles, and for team performance to go up. These metrics are all useful proxy data for leadership and management effectiveness.  

#4 Sponsors 

This fourth impact measure is hugely subjective and influential and yet rarely discussed. 

What do senior people in the organisation think the investment delivered? Are they satisfied with the perceived results? Do they judge that the quality of leadership has improved? Have they seen positive behaviour changes in managers and their teams? 

We ask senior sponsors to complete the same assessment that participants complete.  

If senior leaders grade the investment as a success against these criteria, then they are far more likely to sign off on further, similar investments to achieve greater positive change.  

Delivering impact from your management training 

Business leaders will be pleased to know that a ‘more is more’ approach doesn’t work with management training. One major firm over-invested in training its senior executives to become qualified coaches only for some participants to leave the business altogether and follow a new line of work as executive coaches, taking the training with them.  

Be strategic and selective with the skills that managers develop; train managers to infuse their management style with coaching skills, but be wary of equipping them to do a different job to the one you actually need them to do. 

Managers don’t need to be over-qualified, distracted, or burdened with textbooks full of new leadership models and frameworks. They just need to know enough about how people operate, have the right behavioural nudges to succeed in leading the team well, and inspire a new generation of excellent managers. 

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