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Managers are the people who break or build company culture, and most companies treat manager development as an afterthought. Missy Waggoner, Chief People Officer at Apptio, has spent more than two decades arguing the opposite. Her conversation on Reimagining Company Culture is a working CPO's case for treating manager investment as a strategic discipline, not a budget line item.
Missy's argument lands because the math works. Manager quality is the dominant predictor of team-level engagement. Engagement is a leading indicator of retention. Retention drives operating margin. The chain runs through the manager, and most companies skip the investment that would actually move the chain.
Why Manager Investment Is the Strategic Lever
Gallup research showing managers account for at least 70% of the variance in team engagement on engagement variance is the most-cited stat in HR for a reason. Whatever else a company does to drive engagement, the manager is the dominant variable. The investment use is significant.
The companies that take this seriously do a few things. They train managers before they manage, not after. They hold calibration sessions that include behavior, not just output. They run skip-level interviews on a real cadence. They build ER capacity that handles the cases that managers should not handle alone. Each piece compounds.
Redefining Employee Engagement for Modern Workforces
The classic engagement model assumed a stable workforce in a single location with one career arc. The modern workforce has none of those assumptions. Hybrid, remote, multi-generational, multi-stage. The engagement question has to be reframed for the workforce that actually exists.
Missy's reframing is direct. Engagement is the cumulative weight of every interaction an employee has with their manager and the system. It is not a survey number. It is the felt sense of whether work is worth showing up for.
What Does "Equipping" a Manager Actually Look Like?
Three things. Tools that reduce the operational burden so managers can focus on the human work. Training that builds the muscle for hard conversations. Coaching that catches the gaps before they become patterns. Companies that provide one of the three see partial improvement; companies that provide all three see compounding gains.
How Do You Catch a Manager Who Is Struggling?
Skip-level interviews on a real cadence. Calibration outputs. Retention by team. Turnover rate by manager is one of the truest manager scorecards a company has.
Investing in the People, Culture, and Diversity Space
Missy's framing is that people, culture, and diversity are not three separate budget items. They are one operating system, and the investment has to be coordinated. Company culture work, DEI programs, and employee engagement initiatives reinforce or undercut each other depending on whether they are coordinated.
What Actually Works for Manager Development
Train Before They Manage
The default in most companies is to promote first and train later. Reverse it. New managers need a runway with peer coaching, role-plays for hard conversations, and a clear playbook on the first complaint that lands on their desk.
Run Calibration Sessions That Include Behavior
Calibration is where promotion bias gets caught or perpetuated. Sessions that include behavior alongside output produce different outcomes than sessions that only review output.
Build ER Capacity Behind Managers
Managers should not handle harassment, discrimination, or retaliation cases alone. A purpose-built case management platform gives ER the structure to do that work at scale.
Where Employee Relations Fits
ER is the partner function that lets managers focus on the work managers should be doing. People team efficiency at scale depends on the right division of labor between managers and ER specialists.
How AI Reshapes the Manager-ER Partnership
Vera, the AllVoices AI co-pilot, drafts case responses and summarizes histories so the ER team can move faster. The faster ER moves, the less weight managers carry on cases that should not have stayed with them.
Frequently Asked Questions About Manager Development
How long should new manager training run?
A real cohort runs about a year, not a single workshop. The compounding learning happens through repetitions across hard cases, not in a one-day offsite.
What is the right cadence for skip-levels?
Quarterly is the floor for most companies. Monthly is the right cadence for new managers in their first year.
How do you handle a manager who is technically excellent but struggles with people?
Coaching first, structural change second, role change third. Some managers come back from coaching; others reveal that they are better as individual contributors. Both outcomes are useful.
Should managers run engagement surveys for their own teams?
They can review the results. They should not control the methodology or the rollout. The independence of the survey instrument matters for the quality of the signal.
What is the most underrated manager skill?
Giving direct feedback in the moment. Most managers default to softening, vagueness, or silence. The teams pick up on it.
How Manager Scorecards Drive Real Behavior Change
The single biggest shift in manager development is the move from training to measurement. Training builds the capacity. Measurement creates the accountability. Companies that train without measuring see uneven adoption. Companies that measure without training set their managers up to fail. The combination is what produces sustained change.
Manager scorecards do not need to be elaborate. Retention by team, skip-level engagement scores, calibration outcomes, and ER case patterns produce a reasonable picture of manager quality. The scorecard becomes a calibration tool itself, surfacing the gaps that coaching can close. The companies that publish scorecards openly to the manager population produce different cultural dynamics than companies that keep them in HR. Both are defensible; the open version tends to compound faster.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Missy's case for manager investment is the practical version of every engagement framework. The use point is the manager. The investment in the manager is the highest-return work in HR, full stop. The companies that take this seriously produce different retention numbers than the ones that do not.
SHRM research on workplace burnout consistently ranks poor leadership among the top three drivers of workplace stress. The fix is upstream: hire better managers, train them earlier, calibrate them honestly, and back them up with real ER capacity.
The strategic case for manager investment compounds. Better managers produce better engagement, which produces better retention, which produces lower recruiting cost and faster ramp time. The economics work over a multi-year horizon. The companies that take the long view tend to win the talent fight; the ones that optimize for the next quarter rarely produce a manager bench worth investing in. Situational leadership is one of many frameworks that help managers adapt to context, but the framework matters less than the operational discipline of applying it consistently.
Manager development pays off in compounding ways across the entire people function. Lower attrition, faster onboarding for the next hire, fewer ER cases, and a stronger pipeline of senior leaders inside three years. The investment is significant; the return is more significant. The companies that have done this well are not surprised by retention numbers. They built the bench that produced them.
The discipline scales across organization size and industry. Mid-market technology companies, regulated financial services firms, manufacturing operations, and global retailers all benefit from the same foundational moves. Cultural infrastructure built deliberately compounds across years; cultural infrastructure built reactively decays across the same years.
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