does HR-mandated manager training ever fix bad bosses?

A reader writes:

Does HR-mandated manager training actually work, ever?

I had a director whose behavior veered week-to-week from overbearing to toxic to straight-up illegal. He was very savvy and never put any of the worst stuff in writing. When confronted, he claimed that he was misinterpreted or blamed the language barrier (English is not his native language). However, it’s hard to misinterpret statements such as “how can we force this employee to take less parental leave?” (the employee was taking the amount offered by the company’s own policy and protected by the FMLA) or “this employee’s (supposedly anonymous) company survey results were not very good; you need to lean on them to provide better responses next time.”

Despite having no evidence aside from my own recollection of what he said, I decided to report him to HR, as well as to his manager. His manager told me that he had received other complaints about this director, but as the director was friends with a C-level exec, his hands were tied by company politics.

HR made very conciliatory noises and told me they were taking my reports seriously. They said they would refer this director to manager training and “keep an eye” on him.

Well, three months after that conversation, he got promoted. With that promotion, I got reorged to be under a manager who was once my peer — one of his cronies he pulled in from a previous gig. I think he knows that I’m the one who reported him to HR, and rather than openly retaliating was freezing me out.

Anyway, I’m at a new company now so all this is moot. But it made me curious — is “manager training” as useless as it sounds in this situation, and was this HR’s way of placating me while doing effectively nothing, or did they honestly believe it would work? (From the reports I hear coming out of my old company, it did not).

Sure, manager training can work, but only if  — and this is a big if — the company makes it clear that there are real teeth behind it, meaning that the manager is told they need to improve/change in XYZ specific ways and that their job depends on them doing that, and it’s discussed in a serious enough way that they really believe that, and then the company follows up to make sure enough change has actually happened, and takes further action if it hasn’t.

I doubt your HR department was thinking, “Eh, just send him to manager training so we can say we did something, even though it will achieve nothing.” Or who knows, maybe they did. But you’re likely to see this kind of thing in poorly managed organizations that don’t understand how much good management matters. If they don’t have competent management at the top, they’re not going be invested in holding managers below them accountable to managing well. They might not even know what that would look like, so they’ll think a class with no teeth behind it is good enough.

But that doesn’t mean manager training never works. I actually saw it work with one of the worst managers I’ve ever observed, in a situation that I was really skeptical was salvageable. This guy was an absolute jerk to his staff — verbally abusive, made unreasonable (and unnecessary) demands (like calling people on Christmas Eve for work that could wait), and generally was a tyrant who kept his team living in fear. He was warned in very clear terms that his job depended on him quickly learning to manage differently and was sent to manager training to help him learn how to do that, and … he actually changed.

But the keys there were (a) it was clear to him that this was a one-shot chance and there would be no second chance, and (b) there was a lot of monitoring and follow-up with his team to make sure he had really changed and he wasn’t just hiding it better, including ensuring they had clear, safe paths to raise concerns without worry of retaliation from him. The training was only one piece of it, and in some ways the other pieces were more important.

That said, while he had a hard-to-find skill set in a very niche area and was great at the non-management pieces of what he did, it’s still fair to ask whether all that was worth it versus just firing the guy. I personally thought it wasn’t, and I never felt I could trust him even after his reformation. But the training did help his team a lot.

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