Effectiveness is about doing all the right things to achieve particular goals. Manager effectiveness describes how successful a manager is in meeting their responsibilities. Since managers are involved in almost every aspect of their team’s work, from dispatching work to resolving conflicts to helping them figure out their career goals, their effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) can have wide-reaching impacts.
Unfortunately, too many organizations have the same problem. They rely on subjective impressions and infrequent performance reviews to gauge a manager’s effectiveness. A lack of measurable data means they have no idea where managers are excelling or where they’re struggling, or even how certain responsibilities impact broader company patterns like employee engagement or turnover. Sometimes that’s due to not having the right tools, sometimes it’s due to being unable to even identify manager effectiveness.
In this guide, you’ll find the characteristics of effective managers, metrics for measuring that effectiveness, actionable strategies to improve them, and why platforms like 15Five Manager Products can solve many of your manager effectiveness issues.
Key Takeaways:
- Manager effectiveness can and should be measured using clear, actionable metrics that link to business outcomes.
- Effective managers demonstrate specific characteristics, including communication, coaching, and accountability.
- Organizations can improve manager effectiveness through targeted training, feedback systems, and manager-specific tools.
- Tracking manager effectiveness metrics allows companies to evaluate leadership effectiveness at scale.
- Investing in upskilling managers drives engagement, retention, and performance across teams.
Why manager effectiveness matters
Managers have a broad set of responsibilities that involve them at every level of your organization, such as:
- Hiring: This can involve helping the hiring team review resumes, craft job descriptions, and interview candidates.
- Training: While a manager might not be fully involved in an employee’s entire onboarding, they have an important role to play in training them on the team’s processes and responsibilities.
- Career growth: A manager helps employees figure out how they want to grow in their careers and help them move towards those goals.
- Managing conflict: Managers are often first responders for conflict, both within their team and between their team and others.
- Scheduling work and time off: Managers need to ensure time off doesn’t overlap too much, especially in organizations using shift work.
- Evaluate and improve performance: Managers lead performance reviews and other performance management initiatives, and they’re often the first to notice any performance issues.
- Guide projects and tasks: Employees rely on their managers for support when projects grind to a halt or to prioritize a hefty to-do list.
- Develop team culture and relationships: Company culture trickles down from leadership through every level of the organization, and managers are responsible for turning that into a positive, healthy team culture.
- Report to leadership: Leaders expect managers to report on their team’s performance, the status of important projects, and more.
These responsibilities have massive impacts across company-wide priorities, from employee engagement to morale and turnover. That means a manager’s increased effectiveness can lead to improvements in what leaders care about most.
Characteristics of an effective manager
Do you know how to recognize an effective manager? Does everyone in your organization? Here are the essential characteristics of an effective manager.
Communication skills
The majority of a manager’s responsibilities revolve around communication. Effective managers are strong, active listeners, and they make their teams feel heard. They can also clearly communicate their expectations, turn a leader’s expectations into something that makes sense for their direct reports, and promote transparency throughout their team.
Coaching and development
The most effective managers aren’t necessarily the ones with the teams that get promoted the most, but they are successful coaches and skilled at helping everyone on their team chart a plan for growth that makes sense for them. They know how to give the right feedback to keep people growing and how to strike a balance between the company’s priorities and their team’s goals.
Accountability
Accountability is an essential trait of an effective leader, and it’s just as important for being an effective manager. That means owning up to the mistakes they made, giving credit to their teams for their successes, and being the one to deliver the occasional bad news.
Empathy and trust-building
Effective managers create a sense of psychological safety in their teams, meaning their direct reports feel safe to take risks and bring their full, honest selves to work. Building a psychologically safe work environment relies on managers effectively demonstrating empathy in difficult situations and working to build trust with their teams.
Decision-making
Managers often need to make difficult decisions. Sometimes these decisions don’t have any easy options, and managers need to both make that tough call and defend it when their teams, their leaders, and other teams have questions. Being an effective manager involves having a robust decision-making framework, knowing when a decision doesn’t make sense, and knowing when to stick to one that does.
How to measure manager effectiveness
Knowing what characteristics make for an effective manager gives you a consistent model to apply across teams, but that model alone isn’t enough to measure effectiveness. Just like anything else, measurement requires metrics, and manager effectiveness typically uses the following metrics:
- Employee engagement score: Employee engagement describes how driven and motivated employees are. Engaged employees believe in your mission, take initiative, and encourage collaboration. Measuring this engagement and tracking it across individual teams creates a strong metric for measuring manager effectiveness.
- Turnover and retention rates: Your employee turnover rate describes the rate at which you lose employees over time. Your employee retention rate is the percentage of employees you keep over that same period. By tracking and measuring these metrics on a team-by-team basis, they become manager effectiveness metrics.
- Performance outcomes: Performance reviews and similar initiatives can give you a holistic picture of the outcomes of a specific employee’s work, from achieving goals to their productivity rate. All that data, put together, can be a strong tracker for manager effectiveness.
- Feedback frequency and quality: Feedback loops are an essential part of measuring and improving manager effectiveness. By carefully tailoring your feedback surveys and channels, you can align them with other manager effectiveness metrics and get a clearer view of each manager’s performance.
- Cross-functional collaboration: This is more of a subjective measurement than an objective metric, but a team that collaborates productively with others, with minimal conflict or issues, typically has an effective manager.
Using these metrics in isolation isn’t enough to properly measure manager effectiveness. They need to be used together, so you get a holistic view of every aspect of a manager's performance. Additionally, by tying them to broader organizational KPIs (key performance indicators), you can tie a manager’s effectiveness to company priorities.
Strategies to improve manager effectiveness in measurable ways
Now you know what makes an effective manager, and how to measure that effectiveness. The next logical step? Strategies for improving that effectiveness.
Regular feedback and assessments
Regular feedback and assessment of skills and capabilities are essential for identifying gaps and charting plans for improvement with employees. They perform the same function with managers. They, in themselves, will not improve a manager’s effectiveness, but they will bring together the metrics you’re using to measure it and point the way towards improving them.
Manager training programs
Whether your managers are new to the role or have had a few teams under their leadership, continuous learning and a growth mindset can help them reach new levels of effectiveness. These training programs typically focus on improving communication, making managers better coaches, and tracking a manager’s performance over time.
Upskilling
Where manager training programs are more about improving a manager’s overall effectiveness over time, upskilling is about plugging specific skill gaps, typically as a pathway towards helping a manager grow towards a promotion. But until that promotion happens, upskilling can boost that manager’s effectiveness, based on the metrics you’re tracking and regular assessments.
Leveraging manager tools
Metrics and models are great for tracking and improving manager effectiveness, but they typically have one major flaw. They create a ton of manual work. Tracking, analyzing, and charting a path towards improvement can involve hours of work. Dedicated tools like 15Five Manager Products provide managers with AI assistants, training content, and 1-on-1 coaching that facilitate their path towards increasing their effectiveness.
Data-driven performance reviews
Data is essential to initiatives throughout people operations and HR. Manager effectiveness is no exception. The data you get from surveys, dashboards, and metrics are essential for finding skill gaps with your managers, comparing trends across teams, and building plans to improve manager effectiveness. Data should guide what you do and be used to measure the impact of your initiatives.
Embedding manager effectiveness into company culture
Company culture plays an important role in manager effectiveness. It serves as both the framework for defining that effectiveness and the vehicle through which your initiatives for improving it are delivered. When culture clearly defines what an effective manager looks like (e.g., prioritizing psychological safety, driving employee performance through inspiration rather than punishment), then managers have a clear example to follow in their own growth.
Similarly, culture will inform the ways you improve a manager’s effectiveness, allowing you to filter out strategies that don’t work for your teams in favor of those that do. Your HR and leadership teams, being the primary drivers of culture, are essential to shepherding sustained change in your managers.
As part of this culture push, you can build manager effectiveness into promotions and succession planning. Need to fill a specific leadership role? Instead of a costly recruitment drive, you can build a long-term plan to train up specific managers, helping them become more effective, so they become suitable candidates for that role.
Clearly defining and measuring metrics for manager effectiveness also allows you to make a certain level of effectiveness a key part of your promotion cycle, encouraging managers to continually learn and improve.
Here’s an example. Imagine using some of the effectiveness metrics mentioned above in the context of quarterly business reviews. Instead of just reviewing business metrics and how they trickle down to a manager’s responsibilities, you can include effectiveness metrics, tying them both to a manager’s actions and business results. That way, you give managers a more complete view of how all these elements feed into each other.
Case for technology: Enabling effective managers at scale
Manager effectiveness goes beyond metrics, data, and initiatives. It requires the right tools. Tools that scale with your teams as they grow, and support your managers at every stage of their own growth. Your HRIS (human resources information system), while being a treasure trove of data, isn’t the right platform for this.
A dedicated performance management platform like 15Five can quickly become the nucleus of improving performance and plugging skill gaps across your organization. But with 15Five’s Manager Products, you also get features dedicated to improving manager effectiveness, such as:
- An AI Assistant and coach, for quickly answering questions and providing guidance whenever managers need it, personalized and trained on your data.
- 1:1 and group coaching, facilitated by a team of experts who can identify pitfalls and obstacles before you encounter them, as well as help you chart the right path for your manager effectiveness initiatives.
- On-demand content, for building a consistent learning program that meets managers where they’re at, promoting growth at every stage of their journey.
- A comprehensive manager enablement program, which turns disparate manager effectiveness metrics into proof points that measure performance over time and become a launching point for performance reviews and upskilling.
Want to see what 15Five Manager Products can do to increase manager effectiveness in your organization? Book a demo here.
Effective management
Manager effectiveness drives success at every level of your organization. It helps you build stronger teams, improve collaboration, resolve conflicts, and increase visibility at every step of your org chart. Effective managers are better communicators, better leaders, and better candidates for advancement opportunities.
Identifying the characteristics of an effective manager is just the first step in supporting their growth. Your organization also needs to identify and use the right metrics to measure effectiveness over time, as a foundation of your efforts to help managers improve. These metrics include tying manager performance to employee retention, employee engagement, and the results of your feedback surveys.
By familiarizing yourself with these metrics, you can measure the impact of strategies like upskilling, regular skill assessments, and a robust manager training program. Manager effectiveness isn’t set in stone. It’s a binary. And it’s not a subjective, abstract factor. It’s something that is developed and improved over time. It just requires the right culture, a data-driven approach, and a sustained investment.
Want to see how the right tools can make a difference? Explore how 15Five Manager Products can help you build effective managers who drive engagement, retention, and performance.
