Joanne Werker discusses how the manager’s job keeps expanding, and why businesses need to stop treating recognition as something people either have a knack for or don’t. It’s beyond time to start treating it as a core management competency that can, and should be learned, not just left to chance.
There are 8.4 million managers in the UK, roughly one in four of everyone in work, each holding the day-to-day experience of virtually every employee in Britain in their hands (CMI). Yet 82% of them became managers with no formal management or leadership training at all, according to CMI research carried out with YouGov. Most managers were promoted because they were good at the last job, not because anyone taught them how to do this one.
83% of employees said the manager’s role has fundamentally shifted over the past five years
That lack of training matters, a lot. Our recent survey of over 2,000 employees, HR leaders and line managers in the UK found that 83% of employees said the manager’s role has fundamentally shifted over the past five years. Managers are now expected to hold engagement, morale, wellbeing and career development alongside the targets they were originally hired to hit. Over nine in ten line managers told us they feel personally responsible for their team’s engagement, morale and wellbeing, often paying for it out of their own pockets and time.
Recognising the lack of training
Here’s the problem: nobody is teaching them how to do the part that has grown the fastest – recognition. The everyday business of noticing effort and saying so, sits right at the centre of the expanded mandate pushed on to managers. Yet 74% of them told us they face at least one structural barrier to recognising and rewarding their teams properly, and only 38% of employees said verbal praise from their manager was how recognition most commonly reached them at all. If recognition depends this heavily on one person’s instinct in the moment, it is not a system, it is a gap waiting for a training intervention.
There’s also a perception problem that Learning and Development (L&D) is well placed to address. 92% of HR decision-makers told us they’re confident managers are equipped to recognise and reward their teams. But ask managers themselves, and only 65% feel recognised by their own senior leaders, dropping to 51% among Gen X. This disconnect is exactly where a skills audit earns its keep: HR believes the capability exists; the people actually doing the job say otherwise.
Modelling good practice
What should concern HR and business leaders is the ripple effect buried in the data. 76% of managers agreed that when they feel recognised by senior leadership, they are more likely to recognise their own teams. Recognition, in other words, is a modelled behaviour, not just a mandated one. That has a direct implication for how we design leadership development: recognition training aimed only at line managers will always underperform, because the habit has to be visibly practised by the leaders above them first. A change in senior leadership behaviour is critical to overcoming this challenge.
So, how can HR and L&D work together to address the situation? There are three things worth prioritising:
- First, build recognition and feedback skills into manager onboarding and apprenticeship pathways from day one, rather than leaving them to be picked up on the job. Given that a third of managers still hold no leadership qualification at all, learning it early will help prepare people for future opportunities
- Second, design senior leadership programmes that explicitly practise visible, specific recognition of managers. As our data shows the habit has to start above the manager to reach the manager and then cascade down to all employees
- And finally, build in a simple audit mechanism, tracking how consistently recognition happens across your workforce, no matter whether they work part-time, are hybrid or on the frontline, since our research found deskless workers are recognised for achievements only 42% of the time against 62% for office-based staff. Visibility shouldn’t determine who gets recognised
Importantly, none of this requires a bigger budget. It’s about accepting that noticing people well is a skill like any other and is often unevenly distributed until someone actually teaches others how to do it. For a workforce built on 8.4 million accidental managers, that might be the single highest-value lesson HR hasn’t got around to sharing yet.
Joanne Werker is CEO of Boostworks
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