ATD’s 2026 State of the Industry report makes one thing clear: organizations are prioritizing managerial skills. Some 88% of organizations invest in managerial and supervisory training, and 61% plan to increase that investment. Only 2% expect to reduce it.
That commitment stands out against a shrinking budget. Average direct learning expenditure per employee fell from $1,254 to $846 between 2024 and 2025. When everything competes for attention and your teams are working with less, you’re still choosing to invest in your managers. That’s a deliberate signal about where L&D creates the most value right now.
What the focus on managerial skills really means
The 88% figure points to something more fundamental than another round of leadership programs.
The report also shows executive development training fell from 69% of organizations to 60% in a single year, while managerial and supervisory training barely moved, from 90% to 88%. Read together, those two lines point somewhere: the investment that’s holding firm is the one closest to day-to-day work.
That reflects a shift in how you think about learning itself. L&D is moving away from centralized course delivery and toward learning that happens in the flow of work. Managers sit at the center of that shift because they’re the ones shaping how your people develop and perform every day.
When a manager runs a meaningful 1:1, sets a clear development goal, gives timely feedback, or coaches someone through a challenge, learning happens without a course being opened. Learning built into how work already operates is the kind that scales.
ATD’s data reinforces this direction. L&D leaders rank bridging employee skills gaps (43%), aligning learning to business goals (41%), and creating a culture of learning (34%) as their top priorities. All of those scale when your managers carry them into every 1:1, every goal conversation, every feedback moment, and every team stand-up.
Pay attention to this shift. Your managers are how learning scales.
Where leadership development often goes wrong
Most organizations still build leadership development around programs: multi-day workshops, cohort-based courses, annual retreats, or standalone e-learning modules. These formats can build awareness, but they rarely change what a manager does on a Monday morning.
The intent behind leadership development matters. The most common approaches, however, are too disconnected from how managers actually work. A two-day workshop on coaching conversations doesn’t change what happens in a check-in the following week unless something reinforces it.
Too often, managers learn frameworks they never apply because the gap between the training room and the real moment is too wide. They return to full inboxes and urgent priorities with no structured way to practice what they learned.
There’s also a design problem. Many programs place the full burden on the manager to “figure it out” after the session ends. You hand them a toolkit or a workbook but give them no system that keeps the behavior alive in everyday work. When follow-through depends entirely on individual discipline, most of what you taught fades within weeks.
Managerial skills development stalls when it lives outside how work happens. Everything changes when you equip your managers to develop their teams in the flow of work.
What L&D teams can focus on to develop managerial skills
If you’re making real progress on manager capability, you’re probably doing something different from the norm. You’re moving away from large-scale programs and toward small, consistent actions built into existing workflows.
Build manager habits, not programs
Start with the routines your managers already follow: 1:1s, goal-setting conversations, feedback moments, and team stand-ups. Instead of pulling managers out of work for training, build capability directly into these rhythms. A manager who runs a structured 1:1 every week develops coaching skills faster than one who attends a quarterly workshop.
Consistency matters more than intensity. Five minutes of useful feedback each week compounds over months in ways a two-day offsite never will.
Embed learning into existing workflows
Your managers grow in performance conversations and weekly check-ins. When you tie learning to these touchpoints, a manager develops their team inside the conversations they’re already having rather than in a separate activity.
Consider what happens when a manager prepares for a performance conversation with their direct report’s learning progress already in front of them. The conversation becomes a coaching moment.
Prioritize practical skills
The managerial skills that matter most are specific and daily: giving direct feedback, coaching an employee through a challenge, creating clarity around goals, and building alignment within a team.
ATD’s report found that 71% of organizations already use coaching as an on-the-job development method. You can extend that principle across every manager interaction, turning coaching into a daily habit rather than a formal program.
Make it easy to do the right thing
Even your most well-intentioned managers struggle when the systems around them don’t reinforce good habits. Give them prompts before a 1:1, templates for development conversations, suggested talking points, and nudges built into existing tools. Reduce the friction, and the right behavior becomes the default.
When the right prompts appear inside the tools your managers already use, the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it gets smaller. Your managers improve through small, repeatable actions.
Why this approach solves real L&D challenges
The pressure on your team is real and measurable. Only 28% of talent development leaders expect financial resources to increase over the next six months, down from 48% the year before. The top challenges reflect that squeeze: prioritization of multiple demands (46%), scaling with few resources (33%), coping with the pace of change (27%), and inadequate budgets (27%).
Investing in managerial skills directly addresses those constraints. When your managers actively develop their teams, you don’t need to produce a new course for every skills gap. Coaching conversations and goal-setting routines do much of the development work that used to require formal programs. That reduces your reliance on content production and improves application because your people learn in context.
It also scales: a habit one manager builds reaches their whole team every week, covering ground a central L&D function never could person by person. Developing your managers is one of the clearest ways to deliver more with less.
The real opportunity
The direction is clear: you and your peers are already moving this way. Across the industry, 88% invest in managerial training, and 61% plan to invest more.
The opportunity now is to rethink what that investment looks like. The L&D teams that pull ahead won’t deliver more training. They’ll build managerial skills into the daily rhythm of work, where they compound over time and reach every employee on every team.
The question is whether your managers are actually equipped to make learning part of daily work. That’s where the real return sits.
Explore the full findings in ATD’s 2026 State of the Industry report, sponsored by Zensai.