Funding Manager Development

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The HR Leader's Edge — Edition #7

Everyone Agrees Managers Matter. Nobody's Funding It.

By Heidi Klotz, Leadership Coach & Fractional VP HR

Published September 2, 2026

A newly promoted manager asked me recently what training her company was going to give her.

I asked what she'd been offered so far. A half day session on the performance management system, and a link to the leadership section of the learning portal. That was it. She had six people reporting to her, a hiring req to fill, someone on her team already looking to leave, and her own workload almost entirely intact.

She wasn't complaining. She genuinely wanted to know where to start.

I've had some version of that conversation more times than I can count, and it is not a story about one company being careless. It's a story about where the money goes.

I know where it goes, because I've sat in that meeting. The leadership development line gets cut without any drama. Nobody argues that developing managers doesn't matter. Everyone in the room agrees that it does, sincerely. It just comes after the systems investment, after the technology roadmap, after the headcount plan, and by the time the conversation reaches that line, the money is already spoken for.

Then we walk back out and tell managers that people are our greatest asset.

The belief was never the problem

Let's be clear that nobody in this profession needs convincing.

SHRM's 2026 research has 46 percent of chief HR officers naming leadership and manager development their number one priority for the year. That's the second consecutive year it has topped the list. Research from the Center for Creative Leadership found that 82 percent of talent leaders see leadership development as a competitive advantage in a disrupted market.

Eighty two percent. That is close to unanimous.

Now here's the other finding from that same research. Seventy one percent said they expect to cut L&D budgets if the economy gets worse.

So we believe it's a competitive advantage, and we've already decided it's the first thing to go.

Where the money actually went

Look at what is getting funded instead. SHRM found 92 percent of CHROs expect greater AI integration in workforce operations, and 84 percent expect AI-specific upskilling to increase. Economic uncertainty has replaced wage inflation as the top CHRO concern, with 43 percent pointing to rising operational costs.

The money is moving. Budgets are being reallocated right now, in this planning cycle. Toward automation, toward efficiency, toward AI capability, toward doing the same work with fewer people.

I want to be careful here, because this is not an argument against AI. I wrote back in June that I'm still a believer in what it can do for this profession, and I meant it. This isn't AI versus people.

It's about what quietly fell off the table while everyone was looking at AI.

Meanwhile, the manager's job kept growing

Think about everything we've handed the manager role over the past decade. Hiring. Onboarding. Engagement. Motivation. Retention. Performance. Development. Wellbeing. Culture. Change communication. Most of that used to be shared with HR, or absorbed by a layer of management that no longer exists. It has been steadily downloaded onto one person.

Gallup's numbers on this are hard to look away from. The average number of direct reports per manager rose from 10.9 in 2024 to 12.1 in 2025, and it's up nearly 50 percent since 2013. Ninety seven percent of managers carry responsibilities beyond leading people, and the median manager now spends 40 percent of their time on individual contributor work.

So: more people to lead, more ownership of whether those people are engaged and whether they stay, the same personal workload they had before, and a development budget that just got cut.

We are asking people to do the hardest job in the organization with no training, no time, and no help.

And then we're surprised

Global manager engagement sat at 22 percent in 2025. In 2022 it was 31 percent. The steepest single year drop came between 2024 and 2025.

Gallup also identified the one thing that moves the needle most, and it stings. Employees were highly engaged, roughly seven in ten, when they strongly agreed they had received meaningful feedback, and that held regardless of how large the team was. Without that feedback, only one in four stayed engaged.

Meaningful feedback. That's the lever. And it is precisely what a manager with twelve direct reports and 40 percent of their week committed to their own deliverables has no room to do well.

What it would look like if we meant it

Train people before the job, not after it. We would never hand someone a technical role they'd had no preparation for, yet we do exactly that with leadership, constantly. If someone is on a succession list, start building the skill while they are still an individual contributor. The best time to learn how to give hard feedback is not the week you have to give it.

Support them once they're in it. A one-time workshop is not development. Coaching, peer groups, a mentor, someone to think out loud with when a situation gets complicated. Leadership is a practice, not a certification.

Make the time legitimate. People don't take development time they haven't clearly been given. If a manager's calendar is full and every one of their objectives is an output target, you have already told them where leadership ranks.

Then put the two lines next to each other. Pull up your technology and AI investment for next year. Now pull up your leadership development line. One of those reflects your stated top priority. Whichever number is bigger is your real answer.

So much for focusing on the how

Almost every performance review I've worked with rates two things. The what, meaning results. And the how, meaning the way you got them.

We tell people the how is what separates a leader from a high performer. We put it right there on the form. We talk about it in calibration. We use it to justify promotions and to explain why someone didn't get one.

Then we fund the what and hope for the how.

If the how genuinely matters, and I believe it does, it needs a budget line, protected time, and support that continues after the promotion announcement goes out.

Otherwise we're measuring people against a standard we never taught them. Which, if you've been paying attention, is exactly what we've trained them to do to their own teams.

Heidi Klotz is a Leadership Coach and Fractional VP HR based in Montreal, Quebec. She is a Professional Goal-Centric Certified Coach (Concordia University) and holds the CHRP (Certified Human Resources Professional) and SHRM-SCP (Society for Human Resources Management - Senior Certified Professional) designations. Before founding Heidi Klotz Coaching & Leadership, she spent more than 20 years in senior HR roles at Merck, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Mattel, Ardene and AtkinsRéalis, where she was Vice-President of Total Rewards. She coaches online in English and French.