Leadership
The Manager Is a Performance Investment
As the management role absorbs more demands, executive teams need a clearer bargain: fewer competing priorities, usable authority and a disciplined standard for coaching.
Talent and advantage
Turn Learning Spend into Operating Capability
The strategic return on development comes when employees can perform work the business needs. That requires practice, protected time and a demanding test of transfer.
The capability question
A company can increase its learning budget while remaining unable to execute a critical part of its strategy. Employees attend courses, the platform reports completions and leaders celebrate participation. Yet the business still lacks people who can negotiate a complex contract, investigate a quality failure or run an unfamiliar operation. The missing link is the transfer from instruction to reliable performance.
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that 63% of surveyed employers regarded skills gaps as a major barrier to transformation over 2025–2030. The research captures expectations from more than 1,000 employers across 55 economies. It is not a measured failure rate for corporate training, but it places capability development firmly within the executive agenda.
For the 2026 planning cycle, our recommendation is to fund a small number of capabilities tied to specific operating commitments. Define what the organization must be able to do, under what conditions and to what standard. The resulting investment case should be as explicit as the case for a new facility or product line.
Begin with work the strategy requires
Select a business priority and identify the decisions or tasks that will determine its success. A regional expansion may require managers who can develop local partners and operate across jurisdictions. A premium service strategy may require employees who diagnose problems accurately and recover customer trust. Describe the performance in terms that an experienced practitioner can observe.
Assess the starting position through a work sample. Ask a procurement manager to evaluate a difficult supplier scenario or a service leader to analyze an actual pattern of repeat complaints. Use a consistent rubric and qualified reviewers. An employee’s confidence can be useful information, but it should not substitute for evidence of competence.
Be precise about the gap. Some problems require knowledge, some require practice and others arise because the organization withholds information or authority. Training an employee to make a commercial judgment will have little effect if every decision still requires several approvals. Development and operating design should therefore be examined together.
Buy practice, not just content
The OECD’s Trends in Adult Learning, published in 2025 using the 2023 Survey of Adult Skills, describes stagnating participation in many countries and questions whether short, compliance-oriented training meets broader development needs. That does not diminish the importance of mandatory training. It does suggest that completion volume is an incomplete measure of capability investment.
Build development around a sequence: a clear model of good performance, a realistic attempt, expert feedback and another attempt. Give employees progressively harder work with supervision appropriate to the risk. A manager learning to handle conflict needs to practice the conversation and receive feedback on the choices made. Reading a policy is only one part of preparation.
Choose instructors for their ability to explain judgment as well as demonstrate expertise. Strong practitioners may solve a problem quickly without identifying the cues they used. Ask them to make those cues explicit, discuss common errors and explain how they know when to seek help. That is how experience becomes something another employee can use.
Protect access and time
The OECD Skills Outlook 2025 examines how background and opportunity shape the development and use of literacy, numeracy and adaptive problem-solving skills. Its analysis reinforces a practical concern for employers: access to development can be uneven before a course even begins. An open invitation does not mean that every employee has an equal opportunity to participate.
Inspect who receives developmental assignments, paid learning time and access to mentors. Employees on less visible shifts or in remote locations may need a different delivery model. Managers should explain how they will cover essential work while participants practice. A program that relies on employees using personal time may select for available time rather than strategic potential.
Create routes for employees whose experience is valuable but whose formal credentials do not fully describe their capability. Use demonstrated performance where the role permits it, while retaining qualifications that the work or professional standards require. The objective is a more accurate view of talent and a stronger internal supply of people able to take on demanding work.
Require transfer before claiming return
Agree on an operational test before commissioning the program. For commercial negotiation, inspect the quality of deal preparation and the economics of completed agreements. For problem-solving, examine whether employees identify root causes and reduce recurrence. Include a comparison period or a phased rollout where practical, and acknowledge other changes that might explain the result.
Give the employee’s manager a defined responsibility after instruction ends. Schedule an opportunity to apply the skill, observe the attempt and remove barriers that the employee cannot resolve. Ask the program owner to report the proportion of participants who actually used the capability in relevant work. Without an opportunity to perform, the organization cannot fairly judge the transfer.
Keep the financial claim proportionate to the evidence. Improved work quality may be clear before a reliable monetary estimate is available. Report it honestly, continue observing and stop programs that do not change performance. A disciplined learning portfolio earns executive confidence by demonstrating useful capability, then showing where that capability changes the business.
Evidence & further reading
Go to the source.
- The Future of Jobs Report 2025: DigestWorld Economic Forum · 2025-01-07
- Trends in Adult Learning: New Data from the 2023 Survey of Adult SkillsOECD · 2025-07-08
- OECD Skills Outlook 2025: Building the Skills of the 21st Century for AllOECD · 2025-12-09
Executive analysis informed by the linked sources. Hypothetical examples are identified in the text. Published 3 October 2026.
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