The Training Gap Nobody Budgets for

Part 1 of 4 in the series Training new supervisors with Logic Puzzles for Managers, Volume 1

The training gap nobody budgets for

The average supervisor in Jack Zenger's database of roughly 17,000 leaders took the job at age 30 and didn't receive any formal leadership training until age 42.1 That's about a dozen years of making decisions about people, schedules, priorities and pay with whatever the person absorbed by watching his or her own bosses. I've worked with supervisors in claims offices, utilities, refineries and mines, and I've met plenty of them in their eighth or ninth year who were still running on that borrowed instinct. Most had been promoted because they were good at the work, and few had ever been taught how to lead the people doing it.

This posting is the first of four. It lays out the gap in how organizations prepare new supervisors and why that gap shows up in engagement, productivity and turnover. The second posting looks at what the research actually measures when it compares lecture with active, practice-based training, the third explains step by step how to use Logic Puzzles for Managers, Volume 1: First Leadership Role with a group of new supervisors, and the fourth sets out what the evidence supports and where it stops. The sources are listed at the end in full, so you can check every number yourself.

Zenger's findings describe simple, repeated patterns. Organizations promote people into supervision around 30, start investing in their leadership skills around 42, and leave the years in between to chance.(Note 1) The new supervisor spends that stretch learning by trial and error on real employees, and the employees absorb the cost of every error. By the time the first course arrives, the supervisor has spent more than a decade building habits, and some of them are habits the course will now try to undo.

Gallup's surveys tell the same story from a different angle. In its State of the Global Workplace report for 2025, Gallup found that most managers worldwide say they have never received any management training at all.(Note 2) Manager engagement fell from 30 percent in 2023 to 27 percent in 2024, a drop of 10 percent measured against the starting figure, and Gallup estimated that the decline in global engagement cost the world economy about $438 billion in lost productivity that year.2 The 2026 report, covering 2025, put global employee engagement at 20 percent, down from 21 percent the year before and well below the 23 percent recorded in 2022 and 2023.(Note 3)

The gap is widest at the first level of supervision for a practical reason. Senior leaders get executive education, coaching and offsite programs because the organization can see what their decisions cost. A first-line supervisor in a warehouse, a call center or a maintenance shop runs a crew of 10 to 20 people, and the decisions are small enough individually that nobody adds them up. Who gets the overtime, who gets the difficult customer, which complaint gets followed up and which gets ignored: those decisions happen dozens of times a week, and together they set the climate the crew works in.

When new supervisors do get training, it often arrives as a single classroom event. Somebody books a room for two days, a trainer presents a deck on communication, delegation and performance management, and the participants go back to their crews on Monday. I've delivered some of those programs myself early in my career, and I've seen what happens afterward. The material is sound, the participants are attentive, and by the third week most of it has faded behind the work that was waiting for them when they got back.

Why the line supervisor sets engagement, productivity and turnover

The case for investing in first-line supervisors rests on a finding Gallup has repeated for more than a decade: managers account for at least 70 percent of the variance in employee engagement scores across business units.(Note 4) The same Gallup study found that about one employee in two had left a job at some point in his or her career to get away from a manager.4 The figure covers every level of management, but the first-line supervisor is the manager most employees see every day, and the one who decides most of what their workday looks like.

Engagement would be a soft measure if it didn't connect to operating results, and Gallup has tested that connection repeatedly. The eleventh edition of its Q12 meta-analysis, published in 2024, covers 736 studies across 347 organizations, 183,806 business or work units and more than 3.3 million employees.5 Comparing the top quarter of business units on engagement with the bottom quarter, the median differences were 18 percent in sales productivity, 14 percent in production productivity, 23 percent in profitability, 78 percent in absenteeism and 63 percent in safety incidents.(Note 5) Turnover differed by 21 percent in organizations with high annual turnover (above 40 percent) and by 51 percent in organizations with low annual turnover.(Note 5) These are correlations across units, and Gallup is careful to present them that way, but the pattern holds across industries, countries and economic cycles.

Two economic studies get closer to cause and effect, because they follow the same workers under different bosses. Edward Lazear, Kathryn Shaw and Christopher Stanton studied a large technology-based services company and found that replacing a supervisor in the bottom 10 percent with one in the top 10 percent raised team output by more than adding a tenth worker to a nine-member team would.(Note 6) Better bosses also kept their people longer. The authors estimated that the average supervisor's contribution to productivity was about 1.75 times that of an average worker, which is a useful number to put in front of any budget committee that treats supervisor training as overhead.

Mitchell Hoffman and Steven Tadelis looked at people-management skills specifically, using employee surveys and personnel records from a large high-technology firm. Employees whose manager moved from the 10th to the 90th percentile in people-management skills were about 60 percent less likely to leave, and the effect was strongest for the high performers the company least wanted to lose.(Note 7) Their estimate of the payoff, a reduction of about 5 percent in employee costs from lower turnover alone, came without any measured change in individual output, so the retention value stands on its own.7 That study is a useful corrective to anyone who expects supervisor skill to show up first in productivity. In knowledge work, it often shows up first in who stays.

The cost side of turnover is easy to underestimate. Gallup's analysts put the cost of replacing an employee at one-half to two times that employee's annual salary, a range they describe as conservative, and they estimated that voluntary turnover costs U.S. businesses about $1 trillion a year.(Note 8) More telling for anyone who trains supervisors, 52 percent of employees who left voluntarily said their manager or their organization could have done something to keep them, and 51 percent said nobody had talked with them about their satisfaction or their future in the three months before they quit.8 Those conversations are supervisory work, and they're exactly the conversations a new supervisor avoids when nobody has shown him or her how to have them.

Put those findings side by side and the chain looks like this. The supervisor shapes engagement more than any other single factor, engagement tracks productivity, absenteeism, safety and turnover, and better supervisors, measured directly, raise output and keep people longer. In most organizations the weakest link sits at the start of that chain, with the supervisor who was promoted on Friday and handed a crew on Monday without any preparation for the people side of the job.

My career experience, since I started, has been that the changes in departmental productivity are close to immediate. Employees feel that their supervisor cares about what they are doing. They know that the supervisor is totally aware of the issues and is actively working to remove productivity barriers. My very first project, in a large aircraft plant in Texas, achieved as much as 30% increases in productivity within four weeks after the supervisors started using what they were taught. This increase in productivity was the core of our value proposition justifying our fees. We proposed our project based on our analysis of current supervisory awareness. During our business analysis we measured how aware supervisors were of their people, their assigned work, and assessed existing supervisory training.

Notes

1. Jack Zenger, "We Wait Too Long to Train Our Leaders," Harvard Business Review, December 2012; reprinted by Zenger Folkman, accessed October 6, 2026, https://zengerfolkman.com/articles/we-wait-too-long-to-train-our-leaders/.

2. Gallup, State of the Global Workplace: 2025 Report (Washington, DC: Gallup, 2025); Gallup, "State of the Global Workplace 2025," press release, April 23, 2025, https://www.gallup.com/file/workplace/660197/State-of-the-Global-Workplace-Global-Press-Release-2025.pdf.

3. Gallup, State of the Global Workplace: 2026 Report (Washington, DC: Gallup, April 2026), https://www.gallup.com/workplace/697904/state-of-the-global-workplace-2026.aspx.

4. Jim Harter and Amy Adkins, "Employees Want a Lot More from Their Managers," Gallup Workplace, April 8, 2015, https://www.gallup.com/workplace/236570/employees-lot-managers.aspx.

5. Gallup, The Relationship Between Engagement at Work and Organizational Outcomes: 2024 Q12 Meta-Analysis, 11th ed. (Washington, DC: Gallup, 2024), https://www.gallup.com/workplace/321725/gallup-q12-meta-analysis-report.aspx.

6. Edward P. Lazear, Kathryn L. Shaw, and Christopher T. Stanton, "The Value of Bosses," Journal of Labor Economics 33, no. 4 (2015): 823 to 61.

7. Mitchell Hoffman and Steven Tadelis, "People Management Skills, Employee Attrition, and Manager Rewards: An Empirical Analysis," Journal of Political Economy 129, no. 1 (2021): 243 to 85.

8. Shane McFeely and Ben Wigert, "This Fixable Problem Costs U.S. Businesses $1 Trillion," Gallup Workplace, March 13, 2019, https://www.gallup.com/workplace/247391/fixable-problem-costs-businesses-trillion.aspx.