Ultimately it’s line managers that determine the success of learning and development

A week or two back I attended an interesting presentation, Great employers need great line managers, by John Purcell, Strategic Academic Adviser, Employment Relations for ACAS and a part-time Research Professor at Warwick University. Here are some notes I took:

• There is a gap between intended policies and actual practices. What matters is not the policy, but what employees actually experience.
• There are big variations in employee perceptions of the quality of line management behaviour in terms of people management.
• Most employees have close ties with their managers; for many, their manager is the organisation.
• In recent research, 44% of employees say their manager never or rarely coaches them; less than half of employees say their manager provides them with feedback on their performance.
• In a report this year by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), assessing employee attitudes to the recession, only 35% said they trusted senior managers, only 36% have confidence in their managers, and 46% report growing stress.
• There is so much that managers can do to support l&d: arranging buddies for new employees, organising job enrichment and rotation, providing coaching and guidance, organising secondments, identifying external technical training and conferences, knowledge sharing and running their own briefings and discussions.
• In another CIPD survey, 44% of employees felt their managers were not very effective at l&d.

John didn't include in his list the important role that line managers play in supporting formal l&d interventions. I was reminded of research often quoted by Charles Jennings, the source of which I have unfortunately mislaid, which showed that the contributions that managers played before and after interventions were much more important in determining success than the contributions of trainers or of learners themselves.

The lesson from all this evidence is quite clear. Unless you recognise that line managers are your most important stakeholder and ensure their commitment to your l&d strategy, you stand little chance of success.