Walk into almost any leadership development program and you will find a similar curriculum: giving feedback, running meetings, setting goals and coaching for performance. All of it useful and necessary, and all of it aimed at the visible, mechanical parts of a manager’s job.
But ask why teams are stalling, why good people are leaving and why managers themselves are running on empty, and you rarely land on a feedback technique. The World Economic Forum now ranks resilience, flexibility and adaptability among the fastest-growing core skills employers will need by 2030. Yet the skills that hold a team together under pressure are almost never the ones we train.
At Happiness Squad, we built the Sunflower Model™, a framework of nine trainable, evidence-based practices for flourishing, and translated each one into short daily actions we call micropractices. To find out where the real gaps are, we surveyed nearly 1,000 working adults and measured two things at once: how strongly each micropractice correlates with Composite Wellness, and how widely people really practice it. The most useful findings were not the practices that scored highest on impact. They were the high-leverage skills that are highly effective but relatively underutilized. Two stood out.
The First Gap: Strengthen Your Community
The micropractice with the strongest correlation to Composite Wellness in the entire study was “I actively build and nurture meaningful relationships at home, with friends and at work,” which maps to the practice we call Strengthen Your Community. It registered the highest correlation of any skill measured at .68
However, only 54% of the people we surveyed practice it regularly. That disconnect matters more than most learning and development (L&D) teams realize, because the cost shows up somewhere they are not looking. When people leave, we may assume it is about pay. Research points elsewhere: A lack of belonging and not feeling valued are stronger drivers of attrition than compensation. A manager who builds real connection is doing retention work, whether or not anyone calls it that.
This is trainable, and it is specific. It looks like a manager who checks in before diving into the task, who notices when someone has gone quiet, who makes it normal to bring your whole self to work. L&D can build these moments into manager development directly, rather than hoping they happen on their own.
The Second Gap: Embrace Mindful Living
The second high-leverage skill was the micropractice, “I practice being in the present moment instead of being lost in the past or in the future,” which is part of the practice we call Embrace Mindful Living. It correlated with Composite Wellness at .61, close behind connection, but only 55% of workers practice it regularly.
Presence sounds soft until you see what it protects. It’s what lets a manager stay steady when a project goes sideways, hold a hard conversation without spilling their own stress onto the team and think clearly when the pressure is on. In our data it translated directly into improved emotional regulation, sharper focus and greater productivity in high-pressure situations. These are the exact capacities that fail first when a manager is overloaded.
L&D leaders must treat attention as a skill rather than a personality trait. It can be taught, practiced and built into daily workflows the same way we would build any other competency.
What This Means for How We Train
The encouraging part of the research is that none of this is fixed. These are skills, not temperaments, and people can build them at any stage of their careers.
But how we train them matters as much as whether we train them. The data showed a clear threshold effect. Any engagement helps, but the benefits begin to compound once a person sustains 4-5 micropractices regularly. Below that critical mass, engagement works mainly as stress relief. Above it, the emotional and cognitive gains start to reinforce one another.
That has a direct implication for program design. A single inspiring workshop will not move these skills. Sustained, behavior-based development will. This is the logic behind our REWIRE™ Program, which delivers five-minute micropractices with cohort support so the habits stick. In one cohort at a consumer-packaged goods firm, more than 86% of participants improved their ability to manage stress. At a technology startup, 71% reported higher productivity. The common thread was consistency, not intensity.
Final Thoughts
The skills gap no one is addressing is not a gap in knowledge. Managers are not short on frameworks. Rather, it’s a gap in the human skills that decide whether a team holds together or slowly comes apart, and those skills are sitting in plain sight, waiting to be developed.
For learning leaders, that is good news. The highest leverage move available to you is also one of the most overlooked. Build connection and presence into your manager development efforts and give leaders enough repetition to make those behaviors stick. Doing so can transform not only how managers feel but also how their teams perform.
