Your first-time managers get a program that teaches them leadership essentials and prepares them for the role.

Your senior leaders get executive coaching, carefully designed executive development programs and time with people whose job it is to help them become even better leaders.

What about the managers in between?

Too often, their development is assembled from pieces of both: a few basics from the first-time manager program, some strategic thinking exercises borrowed from the executive offering and a curriculum that looks plausible enough to tick the box. It may contain useful material, but was it designed around what these managers really need, and what the organization needs from them?

Somehow, we have come to believe that providing managers with development is the same as developing them. Rarely does anyone question that assumption.

The program is commissioned; managers attend; learning and development (L&D) reports on completion rates and satisfaction. Then, it appears on the board slide as proof that the organization is investing in its people.

Everyone has done their piece. What happens next is someone else’s problem.

The Training Middle Managers Get, and Why It Looks Like Enough

Middle managers turn strategy into daily work, manage performance, resolve friction and keep delivery moving.

Their development should reflect that reality. However, their learning efforts can become a patchwork of familiar topics: delegation, feedback, coaching, emotional intelligence (EQ) and perhaps a module on strategic thinking to make it feel more senior level. These are not necessarily bad topics. The problem is assuming that putting them together makes a coherent program.

A polished curriculum can look convincing while missing the real issue. Managers might need to improve difficult performance conversations, or they might lack the authority to resolve recurring problems. Those are different problems.

The usual starting question is, “What should we teach middle managers?” A better one is, “What do they need to do differently here, and what is getting in the way?” Without that diagnosis, the program fills an annual training slot.

Why Everyone Stays Quiet

For a while, the arrangement works for everyone.

Middle managers may pick up a useful idea or two. L&D can show that the program was commissioned, delivered and evaluated. Senior leaders can point to investment in the management population. The board slide looks reassuring.

No one has to be careless or dishonest for this to happen. The system may reward visible activity more readily than lasting change. Attendance and satisfaction are easy to report; defining success and gathering evidence are harder.

Geerts’ 2024 framework highlights the limitations of relying on participant satisfaction rather than meaningful outcomes. If the main question after a program is whether people liked it, a positive evaluation can become a substitute for asking whether it addressed the right need or changed anything at work.

There may be a more uncomfortable reason not to ask. Managers may be told to coach while their own leaders expect them to have all the answers or encouraged to delegate only to be criticized when a delegated task goes wrong. The organization may blame managers when the program does not translate into improved performance on the job.

What the Numbers Show About Results and Behavior Change

The evidence does not establish that middle managers systematically get weaker development. But it gives good reason to question whether a program that looks successful on paper has worked.

A 2017 McKinsey survey found that only 11% of more than 500 executives strongly agreed that their leadership development interventions had achieved and sustained the desired results. This concerns leadership development broadly, not middle managers specifically. It’s a warning that a program’s visibility or polish does not guarantee lasting impact.

A 2025 umbrella review examined leadership development in healthcare. Of 86 reviews, 30 assessed organisational or clinical outcomes. The review cannot tell us what happens in every sector, but it illustrates the difficulty of assessing effects beyond the program itself.

There is also evidence that what happens after the classroom can matter. In a field experiment involving 226 Danish public managers and 4,442 employees, Haunstrup and Jensen combined classroom sessions with prompts encouraging goal-oriented development conversations afterwards. Employees perceived their managers as showing more transformational leadership behavior, and those conversations helped explain the intervention’s effect.

While follow-up may not rescue a poorly designed program, but the study shows why leadership development can’t be judged only by what happens in the room.

What Needs to Change to Make Middle Manager Training Effective

The change begins before anyone chooses a provider or builds a slide deck. L&D, human resources (HR) and business leaders need to agree what middle managers should do differently, why it matters and what evidence suggests they can’t yet do it well enough.

Before requesting a program, they also need to ask what is getting in the way. Is it a lack of skill or confidence? Do managers have the authority to act? Do the incentives support the behavior the organization wants? Are senior leaders modeling the very behaviors managers are being asked to adopt?

These are not minor details. If managers lack authority, another module will not fix it. If senior leaders undermine the behaviors they want, the program cannot solve that contradiction alone.

Middle management is distinct. Treating it as first-time management with bigger teams, or senior leadership with less authority, misses the point. Middle managers must put strategy into action, handle competing demands and make decisions within constraints they may not control. Their training should be built around those challenges.

Only then should the program be designed. Content, practice and follow-up should serve the agreed upon outcomes, rather than make the curriculum look complete. Evaluation should return to those outcomes, examining what changed, who noticed and whether it lasted.

Middle managers are often expected to make everyone else’s priorities work. They deserve more than the parts left over from other audiences’ development offers.

By designing training around the specific challenges middle managers face, organizations can better support their growth. When development reflects the realities of their roles and measures progress against meaningful outcomes, middle managers are better positioned to make a lasting impact.