Key Takeways
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Managers are struggling because of their environment, not a lack of skills. In Betterworks’ 2026 Manager Effectiveness Survey of 521 HR and business leaders, constant change (48%) and too many priorities (40%) ranked as top barriers, while lack of manager training (25%) ranked last.
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The manager role has multiplied, not shifted. Most leaders say leading through change (86%), coaching (86%), employee development (85%), and AI-enabled work (82%) have grown more important, and 47% say managers now lead larger teams.
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Manager effectiveness is a leadership alignment and execution issue. 64% of HR leaders say it’s HR’s job, while 62% of business leaders point to executive leadership, so no one fully owns it.
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Four ways to reduce friction: clarify priorities, make performance continuous, reduce administrative burden, and share accountability between HR and executives.
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Start with a friction audit. Before launching a new initiative, ask managers where approvals, meetings, conflicting priorities, or HR processes create work that doesn’t move the business forward.
Most manager effectiveness initiatives start the same way. Someone builds a new competency model. Someone else books a workshop. The bar goes up.
What doesn’t change is everything around the manager.
New Betterworks research suggests we may be solving the wrong problem. Managers aren’t struggling mainly because they lack skills. They’re struggling because priorities keep shifting, leadership signals conflict, and the system around them wasn’t built for the job they have now. That’s not a manager capability problem. It’s a leadership alignment and business execution problem.
We keep raising the bar without changing the conditions
The manager role hasn’t shifted. It has multiplied.
In our 2026 Manager Effectiveness Survey of 521 HR and business leaders in the U.S. and U.K., most said these responsibilities have become more important over the past three years:
86%: leading through change
86%: coaching employees
85%: employee development
82%: AI-enabled work
And 47% say managers now lead larger teams than they did three years ago.
Managers are accumulating responsibilities, not trading old ones for new ones. Meanwhile, the pace of change keeps climbing. Gartner research found the average employee experienced 10 planned enterprise changes in 2022, up from two in 2016.
Organizations keep raising expectations. They haven’t changed the conditions managers need to meet them.
The biggest barriers aren’t problems managers can solve themselves
We asked leaders what’s most likely to prevent managers from being more effective. The top answers weren’t about skills:
48% cited constant change
40% cited too many priorities
25% cited lack of manager training
Lack of manager training ranked last among the barriers we named.
A separate question points the same way. When we asked where organizational friction is greatest, 48% said leadership expectations. That’s a different question from the one about constant change, and it lands in the same place.
None of this means training doesn’t matter. It does. But even a highly skilled manager will struggle when leadership sends conflicting signals or keeps moving the target. One respondent described the job as “the constant emotional drain of balancing conflicting pressures from above and below while holding people accountable.”
No workshop fixes that. Not because managers don’t care. Because the system around them wasn’t built for the way work happens now.
Manager effectiveness starts with leadership alignment
Managers sit where strategy becomes daily work. They translate company priorities into team goals, weekly decisions, and individual conversations. When leadership isn’t aligned, that confusion flows straight through the manager to employees.
The consequences go well beyond manager frustration. Misaligned priorities erode focus, blur accountability, and slow how fast the business executes. And the stakes are high. Gallup has found that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in team engagement, so what happens at the manager layer shows up everywhere.
Our survey also shows why this stays unsolved. Asked who owns manager effectiveness, HR and business leaders point in different directions:
64% of HR leaders say it’s primarily HR’s job
32% of business leaders agree
62% of business leaders point to executive leadership instead
Both groups rate managers as effective today (83% each). But nobody has fully claimed the job of keeping them that way.
That’s the reframe. Treated as an HR program, manager effectiveness gets a training calendar. Treated as friction slowing down strategy execution, it becomes something the executive team has to help solve.
Four ways to remove friction from the work
Redesigning the environment doesn’t require waiting for a bigger transformation program. Start here:
Clarify priorities. Align leaders on what matters most, and be explicit about what managers can deprioritize as business needs change. If everything’s a priority, nothing is.
Make performance continuous. Give managers visibility into goals, progress, and feedback so they can coach and adjust before small problems get bigger.
Reduce administrative burden. Simplify processes and put useful context inside the tools managers already use, instead of adding another task.
Share accountability. HR can build the practices and support systems. Executive leadership has to own alignment and expectations.
Before launching anything new, run a friction audit alongside your skills assessment. Ask managers directly where approvals, meetings, conflicting priorities, or HR processes create work that doesn’t move the business forward. Then take what you learn to the executive team as an execution issue, not an employee experience issue.
The data points to ongoing support, too. Organizations that provide real-time enablement or treat manager effectiveness as a strategic priority report 92% manager effectiveness, compared with 76% among those relying on periodic training or leaving managers to figure it out. This is an association, not proof of cause. But it fits the broader pattern. An annual workshop can build knowledge. It can’t tell a manager what priority just changed or who needs coaching today.
Where Betterworks fits
At Betterworks, we believe performance management should help the business execute, not just document what already happened. Managers need clear priorities, connected performance information, and ongoing coaching support. They don’t need another disconnected HR task.
That’s how we’ve built the experience:
Goals keep priorities visible as they change, so managers aren’t coaching against a plan that’s already stale.
1:1 Meetings tie coaching conversations to live goals, with shared agendas and action items.
Conversational Intelligence helps turn everyday manager-employee conversations into useful performance context, without adding to a manager’s admin load.
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, so teams stay aligned as priorities shift.
The question to ask before your next initiative
If you’re a CHRO or VP of Talent Management planning your next manager effectiveness initiative, try starting with a different question.
Not “what skills do our managers lack?” Instead: “What’s making it unnecessarily hard for them to deliver results?”
The answer may not be a new competency model. It may be a leadership conversation about priorities.
Explore the full 2026 Manager Effectiveness Survey to see what separates organizations adapting to the changing manager role from those falling behind.
Give your managers clear priorities and less admin, not another training program. See how Betterworks does it.
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