Poor manager selection hurts employee engagement

The biggest leadership problem in many companies is not a shortage of talented people, but the way they select, promote, and develop managers. Poor leaders are not always bad people. Many are smart, hardworking, and technically gifted. They were often promoted because they produced results, knew the business, or impressed the right executive. Eventually, everyone discovered that competence at doing the work does not automatically translate into competence at leading people.

The Impact on Employee Engagement

According to Gallup, managers account for at least 70 percent of the variation in employee engagement across business units. That is an enormous amount of influence to hand someone without preparing them to use it well. Organizations often promote based on technical skills while ignoring the distinct requirements of people management.

This oversight creates a cycle where teams disengage. Extensive leadership research points to four dimensions that separate strong leaders from managers who create unnecessary damage. The first area is relational quality.

The Importance of Relational Quality

Relational quality includes trust, fairness, psychological safety, support, and development. Poor managers often treat relationships as secondary to results. They listen poorly, play favorites, react defensively, or show little interest in developing employees.

Staff quickly learn to manage around them. They soften bad news, hide mistakes, and stop raising concerns. That silence can become an expensive liability. Amy Edmondson’s research found that psychological safety supports the learning behaviors teams need, including asking questions, discussing errors, and requesting help. People cannot learn together when honesty feels dangerous.

Strong leaders make it safe to tell the truth. They apply standards consistently, keep commitments, and respond to mistakes with curiosity before judgment.

Enabling Work Conditions

Managers play a key role in how people do their jobs. They decide the workload, the level of employee freedom, the resources available, and who can make decisions. Poor leaders often demand accountability but do not give their team enough authority. They may set new priorities without changing existing ones or encourage initiative but require approval for every decision.

This approach can lead to burnout. The Job Demands-Resources model highlights that overwhelming work demands can cause exhaustion, while a lack of resources can lead to disconnection from tasks. Resources such as autonomy, colleague support, constructive feedback, and positive supervisor relationships can significantly help employees handle challenging work situations.

Great leaders take the time to spot what is making good work tougher than it should be. They work to remove unnecessary hurdles, involve their team in decision-making, and discuss workload before introducing new tasks.

The persistent habit of promoting high-performing individual contributors into management roles without assessing their people skills continues to plague corporate structures. This systemic issue mirrors an outdated view that treats leadership as a reward for tenure rather than a specialized discipline requiring specific emotional intelligence.

Execution and the Use of Power

Execution and coordination require clear priorities, defined responsibilities, and effective feedback. Poor managers leave employees guessing, tolerate weak performance, and create scattered efforts. In contrast, strong leaders define success, clarify ownership, and address performance issues promptly.

Care and accountability must coexist. Without accountability, care is unfair. Without care, accountability breeds mere compliance.

Leadership stewardship also involves the responsible use of power. Research on abusive supervision has linked destructive managerial behavior with emotional distress, lower job satisfaction, weaker commitment, and greater turnover intentions. Exceptional leadership involves more than preventing obvious abuse. It requires the humility to recognize when leadership is not working. A manager who cannot receive feedback will eventually become a problem that no performance review can solve.

Fixing the Selection Process

To avoid poor leadership in the future, organizations should assess potential managers for their judgment, ability to manage emotions, coaching skills, relationship-building, and openness to learning. Once promoted, managers need structured development, regular feedback, and clear expectations because just having a title and a manual is not enough.

If coaching does not lead to improvement, executives may need to consider moving the manager to a non-management role for the benefit of everyone. Organizations get the managers their systems select, reward, tolerate, and fail to develop. If executives want better leaders, they must stop hoping managers will figure it out and instead focus on building the people skills the job actually needs.