Why Do Managers Struggle to Prioritize Talent Development and Engagement Until It's Too Late?

Whether it’s performance review season, talent calibration, or some other initiative to review and assess employees, managers are often caught up in the whirlwind of day-to-day operations, focusing on immediate tasks and urgent deadlines leaving little time for people matters. The urgency on daily operations can overshadow long-term priorities related to talent development and employee engagement, the consequences being burnout, turnover, or active disengagement.

But why is it so difficult for managers to prioritize the criticality of attention to talent needs until it’s a crisis and it’s too late? As an HR person, I’ve long struggled with this behavior given the mountains of research on why spending more time on talent is more important than any singular business metric. And it’s in directly opposite to the well accepted mantra of ‘people are our greatest asset.’

So why does this remain a widespread challenge in companies? The answer, I believe, lies in a combination of psychological factors, organizational dynamics, and the challenge of measuring intangible benefits.

The Psychological Barrier

From a psychological perspective, managers are susceptible to cognitive biases that impact their decision-making. One such bias is the present bias, which is the tendency to overvalue immediate rewards at the expense of long-term benefits. This bias can cause managers to prioritize short-term productivity over long-term employee development.

And there’s the optimism bias, where managers might believe that negative outcomes such as burnout or disengagement won’t happen to their team. Or that if business is better, that will miraculously solve all problems and bring everyone together in a feel-good exercise. Whatever the form ‘optimism’ takes, this false sense of circumstances can delay proactive engagement efforts until problems become unavoidable.

What Does the Research Say?

Research consistently shows the importance of talent development and engagement in organizational success. In Gallup studies, their research regularly show that highly engaged teams have roughly 21% greater profitability. Yet, despite these statistics, engagement levels remain low, with something like 15% of employees worldwide feeling engaged at work.?

The disconnect often stems from a lack of immediate, tangible outcomes from engagement efforts. Unlike sales targets or engineering project completions, the benefits of engagement and development are gradual and less visible, making them harder to prioritize in a results-driven environment.

Measuring Managerial Effectiveness

In terms of making intangibles more tangible, managers often struggle to gauge whether they are doing enough to foster engagement and development. Traditional performance metrics don’t typically account for employee satisfaction or growth, leading to a blind spot in leadership assessments. However, several methods, when applied regularly and holistically, can help bridge this gap:

1. Employee Feedback Surveys: Regular, anonymous surveys can provide insights into employee satisfaction and highlight areas needing improvement. This is critical – its broad, it can dive into deep areas of sentiment and provides targeted areas to build initiatives around.
2. 360-Degree Feedback: This comprehensive feedback mechanism includes input from peers, subordinates, and supervisors, offering a well-rounded view of a manager’s effectiveness in engagement and development. Often through this process it can be better than survey data because it’s more honest and revealing.
3. Engagement Metrics: Tools like eNPS (Employee Net Promoter Score) and regular pulse surveys can track engagement levels over time. Its another data set but it can add to the total view of what’s going on in people’s minds and how they feel about their experience.

The combination of these elements can lead to tangible initiatives that are easier to track the success with. The effort is in the regular review and progress checking of the initiatives just like one would do with business metrics.

Strategies for Companies

Methods aside, to combat these challenges, the research is also very clear on this – for companies to foster a culture that values and prioritizes talent development and engagement, leadership must be concrete about prioritizing manager behaviors around talent management. To achieve this, you can implement: ?

1. Leadership Training: Train leaders on how to equip managers with the skills and knowledge to prioritize and effectively manage employee development and engagement. Hold these leaders accountable. Make them show a framework for their teams, depts, and orgs on the development plans, completion rates, and push to get the management layer in line with the right mindset.
2. Clear Goals and KPIs: Set specific, measurable goals related to employee engagement and development, integrating these into overall performance metrics. This is more effective if it’s a mandate for manager success. If a clear talent roadmap is tied to performance measurement, pay, and critical items, the behavior focus will happen. Arguably you shouldn’t have to ‘incent’ managers to manage, but if the behaviors aren’t there, incentives can help.
3. Regular Check-ins: Encourage managers to have frequent, meaningful conversations with their team members about their development and career aspirations. This would be defined as part of the goal setting – orchestrating the behaviors in the direction the organization wants to see.
4. Resource Allocation: Provide adequate resources for training programs, mentorship, and other development opportunities for managers, in partnership with HR or L&D depending on the company. This can include more personalized focus areas like wellness, stress management, etc.
5. Recognition and Rewards: Acknowledge and reward managers who excel in fostering an engaged and developed workforce. I’m not suggesting gamification but I’m not against it either if it gets the job done.

At the end of the day, to get management more involved in the talent strategy, it must be a whole organization, top to bottom, effort. Doing the right thing with people shouldn’t be a struggle, rather a natural motion that build the momentum and morale to drive business outcomes.

Prioritizing talent development and engagement is not just a moral imperative but a strategic one. While psychological biases and organizational pressures can make this challenging, awareness and proactive strategies can bridge the gap to drive organizational success and avoid, or at least reduce, negative outcomes.