2026 manager effectiveness survey: The multiplier most orgs haven’t turned on

Managers sit at the point where strategy becomes team performance. Our survey of 521 HR and business leaders found that organizations ahead of the changing manager role rate their managers effective 94% of the time — compared with just 59% where organizations have fallen behind. The less effective your managers, the less likely you're hitting your goals.

Introduction

There's broad agreement across HR and management research on where management is headed: a future where managers coach more than they supervise, orchestrate human and AI effort together, and translate strategy into team performance in real-time.

What that research doesn't answer is how organizations actually get there — or what it takes to make managers effective once the job has already expanded past what most management systems were built to support.

That's the gap this research sits in.

In August 2026, Betterworks surveyed 521 HR and business leaders across the US and UK — 263 HR leaders and 258 business leaders, all Director-level or above — to understand how the manager role is actually changing, what's getting in the way of manager effectiveness in driving performance, and what separates organizations where managers are thriving from organizations where they're barely keeping up.

The findings make one thing clear: the manager role isn't evolving one responsibility at a time. It's expanding on nearly every front at once. The barriers holding managers back rarely start with the manager, yet they’re left to figure out how to close the gaps to keep their teams aligned and performing.

That gap isn't cosmetic. It's the difference between managers who can convert strategic priorities into results and managers who can't — which means it's ultimately a gap in whether the business hits its goals at all.

Finding 1: The manager's job has expanded in almost every direction

Managers are being asked to drive business results, lead change, develop people, coach performance, and adopt AI — all at once. The role is accumulating responsibilities faster than it's shedding them.

What the survey found:

• 86% say leading through change has become more important than three years ago.

• 86% say coaching employees has become more important.

• 85% say employee development has become more important.

• 82% say AI-enabled work has become more important.

• 82% say talent planning has become more important.

• 80% say performance conversations have become more important.

• 47% say managers now oversee larger teams than they did three years ago.

"Managers are expected to balance increasing workloads, constant change, employee wellbeing, and business performance with limited time and resources." — Business leader, Director-level, Media & Telecom, 2,500–24,999 employees, UK

What this means: This changes the fundamental HR question from "How do we train managers to be better?" to "How is the manager role changing, and have we redesigned our expectations, tools, and support to match?" Manager capability still matters. But HR can't keep layering competencies and demands onto the role without also examining capacity, priorities, and what managers should stop doing.

What to do next:

• Redefine the manager role around outcomes, not activities — be explicit about the few things managers must be exceptional at now.

• Audit what's actually been added to the role in the last three years, and what's actually been removed.

• Align executive leaders on a shared definition of manager effectiveness and leadership alignment before launching another training program.

Finding 2: AI is expanding the manager's job, not replacing it

AI adoption is already reshaping how managers work. But respondents overwhelmingly expect managers to remain or become more important, not less.

What the survey found:

• 78% say managers already oversee people who use AI tools and agents, or people and AI agents equally.

• When asked which single responsibility has increased the most, AI adoption ranks first at 61% — well ahead of performance management at 39%.

• 54% select AI tools and training as one of the top three investments that would most improve manager effectiveness — the single most-selected investment in the survey.

• 45% say AI-enabled leadership will become one of the most important manager capabilities over the next two years.

• 58% expect managers to spend more time using AI to improve team performance.

• Only 10% believe technology will reduce the importance of managers. 82% believe managers will remain equally important or become more important to business success.

What this means: AI strategy and manager strategy can't stay separate anymore. HR needs to help managers answer two different questions at once: how do I manage people who are working alongside AI, and how do I use AI to become a better manager and leader myself? At the same time, AI should create capacity for managers, not just add another responsibility to the pile.

In our other recent research on performance management, only 50.7% of business leaders stated they were confident in helping employees use AI in their roles of which 75.4% of HR leaders assumed the business leaders were confident. 40.6% of people leaders said they want more support here. 

What to do next:

• Prioritize AI use cases that improve actual manager work: surfacing priority changes and performance signals, prepping coaching conversations, connecting goals to business priorities, reducing reporting and admin effort.

• Explicitly determine with leadership if AI productivity is an important measure, create a path to better support and enable leaders, then measure whether AI is giving managers time back, not just giving them another tool.

Finding 3: The biggest barriers to manager effectiveness aren't in the manager’s control

Managers do have capability gaps. But the survey points more strongly to organizational friction — constant change, competing priorities, and weak alignment from leadership — and that friction is a business execution problem, not just a manager problem.

What the survey found:

Asked what's most likely to prevent managers from being more effective:

• 48% — Constant change

• 40% — Too many priorities

• 33% — Lack of AI skills

• 31% — Conflicting priorities

• 29% — Administrative burden

• 25% — Lack of manager training

Asked where organizational friction around manager effectiveness is greatest:

• 48% — Leadership expectations

• 43% — Communication

• 40% — Performance management

• 39% — Available technology, data, and insights

• 36% — HR processes

• 36% — Goal alignment and priorities

"For me it is the constant emotional drain of balancing conflicting pressures from above and below while holding people accountable." — Business leader, Director-level, Construction & Engineering, 2,500–24,999 employees, UK

What this means: Organizations can't train their way out of a poorly designed management environment. A manager can be highly skilled and still struggle if senior leaders send conflicting messages, priorities shift constantly, or admin work eats up their capacity. That moves HR upstream — its role isn't only to improve the manager, but to partner with leadership to improve the conditions managers are operating in. 

Framed as an employee-experience issue, this becomes one more thing HR is quietly asked to fix. Framed correctly — as friction that's slowing down how strategy gets executed — it becomes something the executive team has to help solve.

What to do next:

• Run a manager-friction audit, not just a skills assessment. Ask managers specifically where strategy, approvals, meetings, or HR process create unnecessary work.

• Present these findings to the executive team as a business execution problem — the thing standing between strategy and results — not as an HR or employee-experience issue.

Finding 4: Manager effectiveness is a shared job, not a handoff

There's almost no disagreement that managers are effective today. There's much less agreement about whose job it is to make them more effective tomorrow — and the data suggests the honest answer is: both.

What the survey found:

• 83% of HR leaders and 83% of business leaders rate managers effective at driving organizational outcomes — virtual agreement.

• But asked who plays the biggest role in improving manager effectiveness, the two groups point in different directions:

• HR leaders are more likely to emphasize retention (46% vs. 26%), employee wellbeing (43% vs. 28% say it's increased most), burnout (39% vs. 28%), and HR-process friction (46% vs. 27%).

• Business leaders are more likely to emphasize AI adoption (67% vs. 55% say it's increased most), rising productivity expectations (71% vs. 59%), and translating strategy into team priorities as a future-critical skill (38% vs. 29%).

What this means: This isn't HR versus the business — it's a translation problem. HR sees the human conditions performance depends on. Business leaders feel the immediate pressure of productivity, AI, and change. As long as manager effectiveness is filed as "HR's program," business leaders will keep waiting for someone else to fix it, and HR will keep owning a problem it can't solve alone.

This isn't unique to managers. Our companion 2026 Performance Management Survey found the same pattern one level up: HR and business leaders agree performance management matters, but disagree on the ability to prove impact (spoiler: business leaders are less confident than HR leaders in proving impact). 

What to do next:

• Build manager initiatives with business leaders, not for them — start from the business outcome they're trying to change, then work backward to the manager behaviors and systems required.

• Give managers an active voice in the redesign; they're where HR systems and business expectations collide and are ultimately responsible for execution.

• Measure outcomes jointly with the business, not as a separate HR scorecard.

Finding 5: The real multiplier is adaptation, not manager skill alone

Not every organization is behind. But organizations that believe they've adapted to the changing manager role report dramatically stronger manager effectiveness and future readiness than those that haven't.

What the survey found:

• 27% say their organization is significantly ahead of the evolving manager role. 48% say it's mostly kept pace. 18% say somewhat behind. 4% say significantly behind.

• Only 25% say their organization has intentionally redesigned the manager role in the last two years. Another 41% say it's done so only partially.

• Among organizations that are significantly ahead: 94% rate their managers effective at driving organizational outcomes, and 91% say managers are prepared for the future of work.

• Among organizations that are somewhat or significantly behind: just 59% rate managers effective, and 47% say they're future-ready.

What this means: The opportunity isn't to manufacture a crisis narrative about managers — most respondents think their organization is keeping pace. The opportunity is to ask what the organizations that are actually ahead are doing differently, and what it would take to move from incremental support to intentional redesign. Manager effectiveness needs executive sponsorship as an ongoing organizational capability, not a one-time leadership-development initiative.

What to do next:

• Establish a baseline for whether your manager model has changed as much as manager expectations have.

• Identify where the organization is simply adding new expectations versus redesigning the systems around them.

• Put manager effectiveness on the executive agenda as a business capability, not an HR initiative.

Finding 6: Periodic training isn't enough. Real-time enablement is.

Organizations that treat manager effectiveness as ongoing, real-time work report substantially stronger results than those relying on periodic training or leaving managers to figure it out.

What the survey found:

• 40% say managers receive periodic training with limited ongoing support.

• 19% say managers are expected to figure it out themselves.

• 24% say their organization provides real-time coaching and enablement.

• 17% treat manager effectiveness as a strategic organizational priority.

Grouped together:

What this means: An annual workshop can build knowledge. It can't tell a manager, in real-time, what priority just changed, where performance is off track, who needs coaching today, or what decision has to happen right now. That requires an ongoing combination of clear priorities, coaching, and support embedded in the flow of work.

What to do next:

• Shift investment from enablement events to real-time enablement.e

• Embed coaching and development into regular performance conversations, not episodic training cycles.

• Equip managers with relevant prompts, context, data, and guidance at the point of need.

Finding 7: Manager effectiveness is a business multiplier, not just an HR metric

Respondents connect effective management most strongly to performance and productivity — giving HR a business case and scorecard that goes well beyond "better manager experience."

What the survey found:

At the employee level, effective managers most positively affect:

• Employee performance — 59%

• Employee productivity — 55%

• Employee engagement — 50%

• Employee retention — 36%

At the organizational level, effective managers most positively affect:

• Productivity — 63%

• Operational efficiency — 34%

• Workforce capability — 34%

• Innovation — 32%

And HR isn't seen as the primary owner of the outcomes: 58% point to executive leadership as playing one of the biggest roles in manager effectiveness, compared with 48% for HR, 47% for strategy, and 40% for operations.

What this means: This is how HR can reframe the manager effectiveness conversation with the executive team. Instead of "we need to improve manager capability," the business case becomes "we need managers who can turn strategic priorities into productivity, performance, and execution." The ownership is shared: executives set priorities, business leaders own results, HR designs the system, and managers convert it all into daily team performance — the same shift we've written about in turning performance into a business execution engine.

What to do next:

• Build a shared manager effectiveness scorecard that combines people metrics (engagement, retention, development) with performance and execution metrics (goal progress, priority alignment, speed of course correction, etc). Ultimately aligning to business impact KPIs. 

• Report those metrics to the executive team together, not as separate HR and business updates.

What HR leaders should do now

"Reduce administrative burden and provide AI tools with clear goals so managers can focus on leading their teams." — Business leader, VP-level, Finance & Insurance, 500–2,499 employees, UK

One respondent pretty much wrote this section's agenda for us: less admin, AI that actually helps instead of adding to the pile, clearer goals, and leadership that gives managers room to lead.

Six steps to take now to improve manager effectiveness:

1. Redesign the role — don't just relabel it. Audit what's been added to the manager job in the last three years, and what's actually been removed. Get executive alignment on a shared definition and expectations of managers before adding another training program.

2. Treat AI as a capacity strategy, not a manager add-on. Prioritize AI use cases that give managers time back — surfacing signals, prepping coaching conversations, reducing reporting — and measure whether it's actually working.

3. Run a friction audit, not just a skills audit. Ask managers directly where conflicting priorities, approvals, meetings, or HR processes create unnecessary work. Bring it to the executive team as an execution issue.

4. Build the fix with the business, not for it. Manager effectiveness can't be an HR program handed to the business after the fact. Co-own the outcomes, the scorecard, and the redesign with executive leadership, strategy, and operations.

5. Replace periodic training with real-time coaching & enablement. Shift budget from one-time workshops toward embedded coaching and continuous, in-the-flow support. Measure behavior change and impact, not completion rates.

6. Put a business-facing scorecard behind the investment. Track people metrics alongside performance and execution metrics, so the case for manager effectiveness holds up in a conversation with the CFO — not just within HR.

Conclusion: The multiplier is real — and most organizations haven't turned it on yet

Most leaders in this survey don't think their organization is failing its managers. Most think they're keeping pace.

But "keeping pace" and "ahead" produce very different businesses. The gap between an organization that's significantly ahead of the changing manager role and one that's behind isn't a few points — it's the difference between 94% manager effectiveness and 59%. Between 91% future readiness and 47%. That's not a talent-management gap. It's the gap between converting business priorities into results and watching them stall.

That gap doesn't close with a better workshop. It closes when organizations stop treating manager effectiveness as a program HR runs periodically, and start treating it as a business capability — owned jointly by executive leadership, strategy, operations, and HR, built into how work actually happens, and measured the same way any other driver of performance is measured.

The manager role has already absorbed the mandate for the AI era: coaching, change leadership, AI enablement, talent development, and performance, all at once. The organizations that redesign the system around that mandate are the ones that will turn their managers into the multiplier this research says they can be. The rest will keep asking managers to do more with the same training, the same admin load, and the same conflicting priorities — and wonder why the results don't move.

Where Betterworks fits

None of this is solved by another manager training module.

Our survey findings point to a specific kind of infrastructure: one that keeps priorities visible as they change, captures coaching context instead of relying on a manager's memory, and connects performance signals directly to the talent decisions leaders are already trying to make.

This is in line with how Betterworks approaches manager effectiveness. Goals keep priorities visible in real-time as they shift. Feedback and 1:1 Meetings capture coaching context in the flow of work, not in a notebook or a once-a-year review. Conversational Intelligence — just launched in September — turns everyday coaching conversations into performance signals automatically, surfacing themes, action items, and goal progress without adding to a manager's admin load. Talent Intelligence then connects those signals to the talent decisions leaders are already trying to make (see Finding 7).

The goal isn't to give managers one more thing to check. It's to give them back the time and context they're missing most in order to close the gap between your strategic goals and successful execution.

You might also find interesting

• 2026 Talent Intelligence Survey: The Gap Between Confidence and Capability — a companion Betterworks study on why the skills data most organizations trust is less complete than they think.

• 2026 State of Performance Enablement Report: The Real ROI of AI — Betterworks' flagship research on the trust gap between executives and employees over AI-driven work.

• 2026 Performance Management Survey — our companion study on the HR-vs-business gap between confidence in performance management and proof it's working. (Link pending — this report isn't published yet; add the URL here once it's live.)

• Performance Enablement vs. Performance Management: What's at Stake for HR Leaders in 2026 — more on why annual, activity-based systems can't answer the questions boards and CEOs are now asking.

About this research

Betterworks surveyed 521 HR and business leaders — 263 HR leaders and 258 business leaders — across the US and UK in August 2026. All respondents held Director-level roles or above. Full methodology available on request.