by Mindtools
Start with your managers
As the financial year draws to a close, many organizations are doing two things at once: reviewing what they’ve achieved and deciding where to invest next. That raises a simple question: where should you invest your L&D budget to make the biggest difference over the next 12 months?
One option is to invest in your managers. It’s often delayed, because it can feel discretionary compared with more immediate operational priorities.
But over the past few years we’ve gathered consistent evidence that suggets investing in managers is one of the most reliable ways to influence business outcomes.
The management skills that actually matter
Back in 2023 we launched our Building Better Managers project. We surveyed more than 2,000 managers and conducted a literature review to identify the skills that most strongly predict management performance.
Interestingly, the skills that emerged weren’t the tactical ones many people expect.
Things like recruitment, running performance reviews, or having difficult conversations do matter. But they tend to rely on a deeper set of foundational capabilities.
Skills such as:
- Coaching
- Delegation
- Active listening
- Building trust
- Empathy
- Inclusive leadership
These skills rarely feature at the centre of management training programmes. But they quietly determine whether everything else works.
If you can’t build trust, delegation breaks down. If you don’t listen effectively, coaching becomes guesswork.
In other words, foundational skills amplify every other management activity.
Measuring those management skills
Once we identified these capabilities, we built the Manager Skills Assessment to measure them.
Unlike many leadership assessments, it doesn’t measure personality or type. Instead, it focuses purely on observable skills. Participants respond to scenario-based questions, behavioural prompts, and stimuli designed to assess how they interpret social and emotional cues.
That gives us a reliable picture of the skills managers actually demonstrate.
But the question we really wanted to answer was this: Do these skills translate into real business outcomes?
From management skill to business performance
To explore that question, we ran a follow-up study with 279 managers.
Participants first reported business outcomes for their teams, including sales performance and retention. They then completed the Manager Skills Assessment.
For every one-point increase in a manager’s ability to build trust on our five-point scale, their team achieved 22% more of their sales target, on average.
Other skills showed similarly strong relationships with sales performance:
- Active listening: +20%
- Coaching: +16%
- Delegation: +14%
We also saw measurable effects on team retention. Managers who scored higher in skills such as inclusive leadership, delegation, goal setting and empathy retained more members of their team.
None of this should be especially surprising. Trust, listening and coaching are widely recognized as central to effective working relationships.
What the data gives us is something more powerful: evidence that these skills correlate with real business outcomes.
A good time to invest in managers
As you plan for the year ahead, it’s worth thinking carefully about where development investment will have the biggest impact.
Improving the foundational skills of managers is one of the most consistent levers you have. When managers communicate clearly, build trust and coach effectively, it shapes how teams perform every day.
And because these are foundational skills, improvements tend to cascade into many other aspects of management, from performance conversations to team development.
Which means investing in management capability now can begin paying dividends quickly in the year ahead.
If you’re interested in developing your managers, we offer a range of options including the Manager Skills Assessment, the Manager Skills Accelerator, and our Manager Skills Workshops.
About Mindtools Kineo
Mindtools Kineo’s vision is to be the leading global partner for driving organizational capability that is underpinned by a skilled, high-performing workforce. We do this by combining behavioural science with scalable technology to equip organizations for today’s challenges and tomorrow’s opportunities.
Mindtools Kineo was formed following the acquisition by Mindtools, a global management and leadership skills development provider, of Kineo, a global provider of workplace learning solutions, from City & Guilds in May 2025. The combined organization, moving forward under the name Mindtools Kineo, brings together the strengths and reputations of both companies.
