I've written a lot of policies throughout my career. Disciplinary, capability, sickness absence, flexible working. Good ones, too: all legally sound, clearly worded and reviewed by people who know what they're doing. And I've watched plenty of them sit untouched on an intranet while a manager rings HR to ask what to do about a colleague who's been late three times this month.
That's the paradox I want to explore here, based on a webinar I hosted earlier this year. We've never had better people policies, and we've rarely had more managers who feel unable to use them.
The policy isn't the problem
When a manager calls HR about a routine issue, it's tempting to assume they haven't read the policy. And while sometimes that's true, more often than not they have read it and do understand it – but they still don't feel confident applying it to a real person sitting across the table.
A policy tells you what should happen. It doesn't tell you how to open the conversation, what to say when someone gets upset, or how to handle it when the person in front of you is also a friend. That gap between knowing the process and feeling able to act on it is where most people problems get stuck.
The result is a quiet over-reliance on HR. Low-level situations that managers could handle themselves get escalated, HR teams get pulled into the everyday, and managers never build the confidence that only comes from doing something themselves.
Why leadership and management skills training helps – then fades
The instinctive answer is training. And training does help – good leadership and management skills development makes a real difference. But anyone who has run a session on this knows the pattern: people leave the room energised, then Monday happens.
The forgetting curve, first described by Hermann Ebbinghaus, shows how quickly new information drains away without reinforcement. Most of what we learn is gone within days unless we use it. Management training typically happens months before the moment a manager actually needs it, so by the time the difficult conversation arrives, the framework has faded – and yet managers account for around 70% of the variance in team engagement, according to Gallup's research.
Research from the Chartered Management Institute suggests the large majority of managers have never had formal management training at all. We're asking a lot of people who have often been given very little.
Coaching is an art, and art takes practice
The best managers I've ever worked with are coaches. They ask good questions, they listen properly, and they adapt their approach to the person in front of them. But coaching is a habit built through years of practice, reflection and getting it wrong – not something a two-day course reliably instils. (In fact, if you’re going to read one book this year, make it The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier – he’ll explain it all!)
Then there's the complication that no two people are the same. We know this, which is why so many organisations invest in psychometrics like MBTI or Insights Discovery. They give us a brilliant language for understanding how people prefer to work and communicate. But very few managers are psychometric practitioners. Knowing someone's profile is one thing. Knowing what to do with it at 4pm on a Thursday, when they've just pushed back on your feedback, is another.
Support at the moment of need
Closing this gap comes down to timing. Managers don't need more information delivered in advance. They need the right support at the right moment.
Imagine a manager preparing for a tricky conversation could get guidance that reflects your organisation's own policies, takes the individual they're about to speak to into account, and helps them plan what to say. We don't need a replacement for HR or their own judgement, but a thinking partner.
That's where I believe AI-powered coaching like MyTeamBuilder has real potential. It can give every manager access to the kind of support that was once reserved for the few who happened to have a great mentor or a patient HR business partner.
Where to start
If all this sounds familiar, three questions are worth asking in your own organisation:
- How many of the calls your HR team takes could a confident manager handle alone?
- How long after training do your managers actually use what they learned?
- What support is available to a manager at the exact moment a situation lands?
Your answers will tell you where to focus first. Great policies set the standard. Whether that standard is met depends almost entirely on the managers responsible for upholding it.
MyTeamBuilder: AI-powered coaching for every manager
MyTeamBuilder brings AI-powered coaching directly into the flow of a manager's working day – helping them prepare for difficult conversations, understand their team better, and build the leadership and management skills that training alone rarely sticks.
If you'd like to see how it works, book a demo here.
About the author
Karen Lough is director of people at Ciphr. She has nearly 20 years’ experience in learning and development and leading key transformation projects, including capability and behavioural frameworks, leadership development and performance management.