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What happens when you don’t train your managers?

October 27, 2023
Fist on table

Following a recent study by the Chartered Management Institute (CMI), Anthony Painter, director of policy at CMI commented:

“In any skilled area of modern work, you would expect people in positions of competence to receive at least minimal training. You want your plumbers to be trained, you want your cybersecurity people to be trained – well the same is true of managers”.

Yet the study points to widespread concern over the quality of managers, with 82% of bosses deemed ‘accidental’, having had no formal training.

Let’s look at that figure again – 82% of managers have not had formal training!

“This stuff is dragging down businesses, dragging down the economy, and also stymying the ability of public services to do what we need them to do.”

Click here to read the article in the Guardian about this survey

So, what happens when you don’t train your managers?

The study reveals that almost 33% of UK workers say they’ve quit their job in the past because they were working in a negative workplace culture.

Of the 2018 workers questioned, 28% cited a negative relationship with a manager, and 12% cited discrimination and harassment as reasons for leaving their job.

But even if managers don’t go as far as quitting there are many other ways that an organisation can be affected when managers are not trained;

  • lack of motivation
  • no desire to hit goals
  • lack of trust
  • no direction

Of the workers who told researchers their manager was ineffective, one-third said they were less motivated to do a good job and as many as half were considering leaving in the next 12 months.

There’s a significant cost to allowing poor management in your organisation; the costs of re-hiring, re-training, missing goals and deadlines and therefore losing future contracts with clients – and that doesn’t address the mental impact on individuals who find themselves in a team with an ineffective manager.

Yet there are many things you can do to invest in your managers. More on that in the next blog, but for now, here are two of our most popular training courses with a focus on developing people management skills;

To find out more about our People Management training, click the links above or call us on 01392 409 198.