Manager and Team Development

Teamwork Processes & Routines

Management Gap: Leader And Team

8 min read

June 2025

Most management training isolates the manager and ignores the team. This piece explores why real leadership development must be collective—and how to make it stick.

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Stop Training Managers Like They Work Alone

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Monday morning in a bustling office. A middle manager, Alex, juggles back-to-back meetings, urgent emails, and a team looking for guidance. Despite being promoted for exceptional technical skills, Alex received no formal management training. The result? A team lacking direction, dwindling morale, and mounting stress.

This scenario is all too common. Middle managers—the linchpins between strategy and execution—often find themselves underprepared and overwhelmed.

Senior leaders receive strategic development, and frontline staff might get onboarding, but middle managers are frequently left to "figure it out." This oversight isn't just a minor hiccup; it's a significant organizational blind spot.

Research underscores the critical role of middle managers. McKinsey’s analysis reveals that organizations with top-performing middle managers achieve significantly higher total shareholder returns—anywhere from 3x to 21x more—compared to those with average managers. These managers are not mere coordinators; they are performance multipliers and culture carriers.

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The Training Gap

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Yet, the training gap is glaring. Gallup’s 2025 report indicates that only 44% of managers globally have received formal management training. In the UK, the situation is even more dire. The Chartered Management Institute (CMI) reports that 82% of new managers are “accidental managers,” thrust into leadership roles without adequate preparation.

This lack of training has tangible consequences. Gallup attributes 70% of the variance in team engagement to managers. Disengaged managers lead to disengaged teams, resulting in decreased productivity and increased turnover. In fact, poor management has prompted one in three UK workers to quit their jobs.

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The Bigger Blind Spot: Training Without the Team

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But there’s perhaps an even bigger issue: when managers do receive training, the team is often left out of the picture. Leadership isn't an isolated skill—it’s inherently relational and collective.

Imagine training a conductor to master the nuances of tempo, emotion, and baton technique—then asking them to lead an orchestra that’s never rehearsed, never seen the music, and never played together before. The result? Missed cues, clashing notes, and a flat performance. Leadership, like music, depends on shared rhythm.

Or picture a Formula 1 pit crew. Only the crew chief is trained, briefed, and prepped. The car pulls in. He starts shouting instructions to the rest of the team—who’ve never seen the process before. Tyres go flying. Fuel gets spilled. And the race is lost before it even leaves the pit. High performance doesn’t happen through direction alone—it happens through coordination.

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Similarly, training managers without involving their teams leads to disjointed execution and disillusioned people.

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The Translation Gap

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Even when a manager returns from training brimming with insight—say, into psychological safety or collective goal-setting—they re-enter a workplace that feels more like crisis triage than mindset shift.

Their inbox is groaning. Their team is fire-fighting. And those grand intentions hit the usual immovable obstacles:

Time: Who has it?
Support: Who gives it?
Resistance: Who wants another “new thing”?
Fear of failing: Who wants to look foolish?
Culture: Who dares to disrupt the unspoken rulebook?

What looked like a transformation journey quickly becomes a U-turn back to “business as usual.” Faced with these barriers, managers default to old habits—and the impact of their training evaporates.

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The Burden of Being the Bottleneck

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Positioning managers as the sole conduit for leadership transformation places an unsustainable burden on them. They're expected to absorb training content, interpret it, and translate it into everyday team dynamics—while also resolving interpersonal issues, motivating performance, and holding it all together. When the system relies on one person to be the pivot point for all change, it not only risks burnout but creates a fragile dependency model.

Studies show that when teams share responsibility and operate with high interdependence, performance improves—often without relying as heavily on “empowering leadership” from above. In other words: when the whole team is involved in learning and applying new ways of working, it’s better for the team and better for the manager.

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The Evidence Is Clear: Collective Development Works

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Thankfully, science offers a clear path forward. Leadership should be treated not as a positional privilege, but as a shared, organizational responsibility.

Geerts (2024) argues that leadership isn’t about individual charisma but collective ownership, woven into the organization’s mission and values. Less lone wolf, more well-coordinated pack.

Salas et al. (2008) found that team-based training improves outcomes by 20% over individual training. Skills like communication, emotional intelligence, and collaboration don’t develop in a vacuum.

Dannels et al. (2009) showed that when three or more team members train together, something shifts: shared language, mutual accountability, practical traction. It’s not just knowledge—it’s cultural momentum.

So why are we still pretending the lone manager is the hero of the story?

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Introducing Systemic Thinking

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Systemic thinking—thank you, Peter Senge—is more than a buzzword. It’s a mindset that views organizations not as collections of individuals, but as living systems of relationships.

It asks us to stop pretending we’re training parts and start realizing we’re shaping wholes. Leadership lives in the spaces between people: in conversations, rituals, decisions, and those Slack threads that spiral into existential tangents.

Phil Jackson, legendary NBA coach, put it simply:

“The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team.”

Team coaches echo this all the time. When they focus not just on individual competencies but on the interpersonal dynamics and relationship fabric of teams, they witness exponential shifts.

A well-designed, collective approach to leadership unlocks trust, creativity, and sustainable performance.

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From Solo Sessions to Symphonic Performance

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So how do we move from solo sessions to something more symphonic? We design for collective growth and experimentation. We start by asking not just what the manager learns—but how the team practices.

Time: Carve out space for managers and teams to apply what they’ve learned—together.
Culture: Invite curiosity, trial and error, and the occasional glorious failure.
Engagement: Bring the team into the learning journey. Because nothing says “we’re in this together” like actually being in it together.

Real transformation doesn’t come from heroic individualism—it comes from coordinated, practiced, team-level growth.

So ask yourself:

How much potential are we wasting by leaving the team out?
What is leadership training without collective context?
And really—what is a leader without a team?

Probably just someone with a badge and a headache. Let’s stop training managers like they work alone. Let’s train for reality—and give teams the collective leadership they actually need.