Managers play an important role as leaders throughout the org chart. They translate strategy into day‑to‑day decisions, shape team culture, and either unlock or block performance.
Like any employee, most managers have areas for growth and improvement. But it's not always easy to know which managers should improve, what they should improve, and which KPIs are relevant. Developing manager effectiveness is a multifaceted process that requires a data-driven and holistic approach.
Great management is crucial for the success of any organization. Effective managers can align teams and ensure they’re working efficiently toward goals and objectives. They can also ensure employees are engaged and motivated to be as productive as possible.
Managers also often play a key role in creating a positive work environment and culture that attracts and retains top talent. In short, great management can lead to more growth, innovation, profitability, productivity and employee satisfaction. It makes sense for organizations to dedicate time and resources to supporting management.
Great managers sometimes emerge naturally, but it’s typically a joint effort between the manager and the company. It’s the difference between a manager who is good on their own or a manager who is great because their company gives them the tools, training and resources they need to thrive and succeed.
Facilitating great management in your organization requires identifying two different types of managers
Each type requires a different approach to support its success. Let’s start with identifying excellent managers.
Excellent managers embody traits that drive both performance and trust. They are approachable, decisive, and resilient under pressure. Their leadership style directly influences employee motivation and retention. Strong leaders also model accountability, set ethical standards, and act as role models for their teams, creating a ripple effect throughout the organization.
High-performing managers ensure that every team member understands not only what needs to be achieved but also why it matters. They align team goals with organizational priorities, helping employees see the bigger picture. Studies confirm that when employees know what’s expected of them, they are 2.5× more likely to be engaged at work. Great managers use tools like OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) or SMART goals to establish clarity, provide structure, and measure progress.
Great managers excel at two-way communication. They don’t just broadcast instructions, they actively listen. Open dialogue builds psychological safety, which Harvard research shows is one of the strongest predictors of team innovation and performance. Effective managers balance team meetings with one-on-one conversations, ensuring that employees feel heard, valued, and respected. By listening to feedback, they not only resolve issues early but also generate new ideas that improve processes and results.
Feedback is one of the most powerful tools a manager has. Excellent managers give feedback that is timely, specific, and actionable—praising achievements while addressing improvement areas in a supportive way. Great managers treat feedback as a continuous conversation, not a once-a-year review. They help employees build on strengths, overcome challenges, and set the stage for long-term growth.
You can track excellent managers' processes, KPIs and get feedback from them and their team members to see why they perform at such a high level. Doing this allows you to develop best practices and training programs for other managers or new managers in your organization.
In short, excellent managers should be recognized and rewarded so you can retain them. You can also learn from them, so make sure to pay attention to what they’re doing right so you can implement these practices elsewhere.
So, we know that some managers naturally excel in their roles, but most managers need additional support to reach their full potential. This is why it’s important to spot managers who need improvement.
Identifying these weaknesses allows you to give these managers the resources and training they need to be more effective.
Rather than criticizing these managers, it’s best to empower them and identify what they need to succeed.
To identify where leadership can improve, you can utilize software platforms like Worklytics. Worklytics protects the privacy of employees while still providing actionable metrics like high turnover rates based on team, poor collaboration between team members, negative performance reviews about management and poor performance outcomes. Once you have these metrics in hand, you can proactively address them and implement strategies that will help these managers and teams get on the right track and succeed.
Worklytics is a powerful people analytics tool that leverages actionable data metrics to facilitate manager growth and effectiveness. With Worklytics, you can get insights into data points like team productivity, department performance, employee engagement, signs of micromanagement, management overload and much more.
Let’s take a closer look at the different ways Worklytics facilitates manager growth.
Worklytics offers in-depth data on behavioral analytics in your workplace. It can give you detailed insights into how managers interact with their teams and make decisions. Metrics like communication patterns, meeting frequencies, collaboration behaviors and more can help identify what the best managers do differently and what struggling managers are having trouble with. By identifying these strengths and areas for improvement, you can strengthen management practices organization-wide and provide targeted coaching and support to managers who need it.
Worklytics also gives you a detailed analysis of team engagement and workflow patterns. Employee engagement scores, task completion rates, burnout and other metrics can help you understand why some teams are succeeding and why some teams are underperforming. It also helps you understand how managers are engaging with their teams. This information helps leadership and managers make informed decisions on how to optimize workflows, improve employee engagement, enhance overall productivity and improve workplace satisfaction.
Effective benchmarking is another valuable feature of Worklytics. You can find out how your workplace KPIs stack up by comparing against other businesses in your industry. This also helps you understand why they’re excelling and how you can improve your organization to achieve similar results. Sometimes it can be difficult to determine what goals are realistic, but benchmarking is an ideal way to set performance targets.
Worklytics also provides actionable insights with intuitive self-serve dashboards. Instead of just providing raw data analytics, your managers get suggestions and information to improve their effectiveness. By implementing these recommendations and making more data-driven decisions, you can see tangible improvements in managerial performance and the performance of their teams over time. No more guesswork and going completely off your gut. Worklytics provides the resources you need to implement a data-driven culture in your organization.
Finally, Worklytics enables continuous improvement. Simply implementing some suggestions into your current practices and processes isn’t enough to make meaningful, long-term changes. It’s essential to regularly monitor and analyze performance so you can track progress and iterate over time. This ongoing process of assessment and feedback fosters a culture of growth and learning that enables your managers, and their teams, to succeed.
With Worklytics on your side, you’ll have the information you need to make changes that make a difference in productivity, performance and, of course, manager effectiveness. But it still helps to have a step-by-step strategy in place when you have the goal of supporting your managerial talent. Here are some key steps you can take to enhance performance over time.
Leveraging data is crucial for improving manager effectiveness in the modern organization. You can now collect and analyze data on numerous metrics like behavior, performance, engagement and much more. You can see what works and what doesn’t. Taking a data-driven approach to improving your organization ensures you’re making informed decisions when developing and supporting your managers.
Building off our step about collecting data, it’s also essential to analyze trends that you see in your data. This allows you to see where changes and improvements need to happen at a more macro level. Understanding how different metrics and patterns influence your organization allows you to create targeted strategies to address your biggest challenges and optimize your company as a whole.
Managers can’t grow if they don’t know what they’re doing wrong. Regular and constructive feedback can help managers consistently improve and make progress. It also helps to highlight their strengths and provide motivation and encouragement. Foster a culture of open communication and feedback, so your managers know you care about their success and continued development.
Training and support are two of the best tools for improving manager effectiveness. Make sure to offer a range of training programs, workshops and mentorship for managers to continually improve and grow their skills.
You should also make sure to support managers by providing them with the resources and tools they need. This can mean putting the right technology in their hands to better perform their roles and responsibilities. Giving them access to communication software or people analytics platforms to observe their team’s engagement, for instance, can help them perform their jobs as effectively as possible.
Finally, as we mentioned earlier, you need to always monitor progress to ensure your efforts to improve manager effectiveness are effective. Regularly assess performance, track the impact of strategies you’ve implemented and continue to iterate and make adjustments as needed. This ensures your managers, your employees and your organization as a whole are always improving and working toward optimal performance.
Improving manager effectiveness helps everyone to feel better and work better, making an impactful difference for teams. A culture of excellence and continuous improvement starts with leadership. Investing in the development of managers is essential, and affects nearly every aspect of the business. If your managers are performing poorly, it can affect team performance, morale, retention and more. If your managers are performing at a high level, their teams are likely following suit and are happier for it.
If you want to help managers make a difference in your organization, it’s time to give Worklytics a try. Book your demo today to see how Worklytics can help.
