The 'Secret Ingredient' for Effective Training: Middle Managers

“The core idea of the paper is that training programs aren’t necessarily automatically embraced by the organization, even when there is strong support from the top,” Sadun explains. “You need the middle manager to encourage employees to get trained.”

Auxiliary survey data revealed that high-training managers shared key traits: Strong social skills, a desire to help employees achieve their goals, and a commitment to helping underperformers.

“It was apparent that these managers were very different,” Sadun recalls. “Many were keen to show themselves as nurturers of talent. Some were even fine if people got trained and left their teams. They saw that as a point of pride.”

Tangible training impact

A well-trained workforce can prepare companies to handle spikes in market demand, the report finds. Researchers examined how increased employee training, for example, enabled the carmaker to boost production and the restaurant and the retailer to adapt to a new delivery app.

When faced with more intense demand pressure, employees on teams led by high-training managers missed work significantly less than their colleagues in other teams. Across all three firms, absenteeism stayed relatively stable for employees reporting to high-training managers during the period of increased production, while it increased in teams led by low-training managers.

In the car company, these employees posted a 39% increase in absenteeism after the demand shock hit the plant. Similarly, at the quick-service restaurant, low-training managers saw a 26% increase in absences two months after introduction of the app. By comparison, high-training teams posted only a 3% increase.

The effect even carries over when nature gets in the way of work. The researchers looked at absenteeism rates following significant tropical rainstorms. Here again, high-training teams outperformed, as absences fell 2.5% compared to an increase of almost 10% for low-training teams.

One potential conclusion: When things get tough, “you can use your middle managers to keep your teams motivated,” Sadun says.

Building skills for the AI era

The study is the first academic paper from the Digital Reskilling Lab, led by Sadun and Tamayo as part of the Digital Data Design Institute at Harvard.

The lab explores how organizations and governments can help workers adapt to new technologies, such as AI—or, as the lab asks on its website, understand whether “workers whose jobs will be replaced by new technologies be able to redeploy their skills in different roles quickly?”

The study offers some preliminary indication that training can help advance careers. High training managers were also more likely to promote their workers, and did so much more than low-training managers as they were coping with the demand shock.

Additional studies are corroborating the crucial role that middle managers play for the implementation of training programs, Sadun says, and the team is “always looking at organizations to understand how training programs are done, so that training investments can achieve their full promise.”

Image created by Ariana Cohen-Halberstam with asset from AdobeStock.