Forget David Brent- middle managers are unsung heroes of business success

TRAINING has long been seen as one of the most important tools for improving the skills of workers, increasing productivity and enhancing business performance.

- DYLAN JONES-EVANS

Yet despite major investments by firms across the world, employee participation in these programmes often remains low and their effectiveness limited.

Much of the focus on leadership in business has traditionally focused at the very top of the organisation, with countless studies, books and management theories centred on the role of CEOs and senior executives.

But "Training Within Firms" - a new study from Harvard Business School - suggests we may be looking in the wrong place and that the real day-to-day impact on workforce development is happening further down the organisational hierarchy, namely in the hands of middle managers.

Drawing on detailed data from three large companies, researchers found that even in firms where training is centrally designed and incentivised, the actual take-up among employees can vary dramatically depending on the attitudes and behaviours of their immediate supervisors.

What explained this disparity was not geography, team composition or even differences in shift patterns, but the specific manager in charge.

In all three firms, the researchers identified so-called "High Training" (HT) managers, namely those whose teams were consistently participating more in training activities.

These managers were not officially responsible for delivering or enforcing training, nor were they rewarded for encouraging it, but nevertheless played a quiet and crucial role in shaping how training was perceived and prioritised by their teams.

Indeed, when a HT manager replaced a "Low Training" (LT) counterpart, employee participation in training surged by an average of 50%, kicking in almost immediately and, in most cases, persisting beyond the first two months.

Surveys conducted with hundreds of these managers provided more insight and showed that demographics like age, gender or years in post made little difference.