In every organization, there exists an essential yet all-too-often overlooked segment of leadership: the middle managers who form the backbone of daily operations. These aren't senior executives who receive specialized coaching, nor those who lack experience and may be enrolled in early manager training. They're the steady performers who keep things running day in and day out. Managers who are making do, holding on as best they can, while typical development programs pass them by.
This "forgotten middle" represents an enormous opportunity. When properly developed and supported, these managers become the driving force behind engaged teams, strong retention, and improved business performance. Yet traditional approaches to leadership development consistently fail to reach them effectively.
The Challenge: Development That Doesn't Develop
Most organizations understand that managers matter. Our research shows that employees with excellent managers are 5.3x more likely to see growth opportunities and 4.1x more likely to feel valued by their organization. Conversely, those reporting to poor managers are 10x more likely to leave within a year — with these departures representing nearly half of all voluntary turnover.
But knowing managers matter isn't enough. Despite significant investments in leadership development, organizations struggle to create meaningful impact because:
- Traditional coaching happens infrequently and in isolation, often disconnected from daily work,
- Generic content fails to address individual development needs,
- Managers lack the tools to apply guidance within their specific contexts,
- Improvements in leadership effectiveness are difficult to measure objectively, and
- Development rarely connects to downstream impacts on teams and business outcomes.
The result? A significant portion of your management layer — the people who most directly influence your employee experience — continues to struggle despite significant investments of time and resources.
A Fresh Approach to Manager Development
Perceptyx’s research-based leadership development solution, Grow, fundamentally reimagines leadership development by transforming it from an episodic program into a continuous experience that's personalized, actionable, and measurable.
At its core, Grow creates a virtuous cycle between feedback and development. By connecting leadership behaviors directly to employee experience data, Grow surfaces exactly what managers need to improve and how those improvements will impact their teams. This creates development that's not just personalized but purposeful, focused on behaviors that truly matter.
Let's see how this experience-aware approach differs from traditional development through a simple example.
The traditional coaching approach
A manager receives feedback that they need to improve team communication. They attend a generic workshop on communication skills that offers best practices but lacks context about their specific team challenges. Back at work, they struggle to apply these concepts amid competing priorities. Six months later, with no follow-up or measurement, any initial improvements have faded.
Grow's EX-aware approach
The same manager receives feedback highlighting communication gaps, but Grow's AI Coach shows them exactly which communication behaviors their team needs most, based on employee experience (EX) data. The manager sees that psychological safety scores are low and learns that team members are hesitant to share concerns. AI Coach helps create a targeted development plan focused on the precise behaviors known to improve employees' sense of psychological safety at work.
Throughout the following weeks, the manager receives intelligent nudges in their workflow — micro-learning moments that provide practical guidance for upcoming team meetings, one-on-ones, and projects. These nudges aren't generic tips but contextual prompts informed by their team's actual needs. This allows the manager to apply learning within the context of real-world scenarios, creating a more psychologically safe environment in their everyday interactions with team members.
As the manager practices these behaviors, Grow measures both their engagement with development content and the impact on team metrics, as seen through changes in their teams’ sentiment over time. The entire experience flows naturally within their daily work, requiring minimal additional time while delivering maximum impact.
The Four Pillars of Effective Manager Development
Grow's approach rests on four interconnected components that transform how managers learn and grow:
- Flexible Multi-Source Feedback
Regular insights from 360 feedback create a detailed picture of each manager's strengths and opportunities. By integrating this feedback with broader employee experience data, Grow reveals not just what behaviors need improvement, but which ones will have the greatest impact on the team’s experience and performance. - AI-Assisted Development Planning
Grow's AI Coach analyzes feedback and automatically generates personalized development plans tailored to each manager's specific needs and team context. This removes the blank-slate paralysis that often follows feedback, providing clear starting points for improvement. - Actionable Coaching in the Flow of Work
Intelligent Nudges — bite-sized suggestions rooted in behavioral science – meet managers where they are with relevant, immediately applicable guidance. With a library of over 2,500 research-backed nudges, Grow helps managers build leadership capabilities naturally, without disrupting their workflow. - Measurable Behavior Change & Impact
By connecting development activities directly to employee experience metrics, Grow quantifies the impact of leadership improvement on engagement, retention, and business performance. This transforms leadership development from a talent management expense to a strategic business investment with a clear line of sight to ROI.
From Theory to Practice: The Impact of Experience-Aware Development
Early adopters of Grow have already seen impressive results. While the following story combines experiences from several of these early users into a composite hypothetical narrative, it reflects the transformative outcomes we've observed and demonstrates Grow's real-world impact.
Consider a global aerospace company with 10,000 employees and more than 800 frontline and mid-level managers that had arrived at a crossroads. Recent employee feedback had uncovered deep cultural challenges that threatened both performance and reputation. Teams reported feeling dismissed and unsupported. Internal communication was fractured. Trust in leadership had eroded to concerning levels. Many employees felt there was no safe path to raise issues without being labeled a problem.
These concerns weren't theoretical — they were having tangible negative impacts. Performance metrics were suffering. Safety initiatives were stalling. And the company's reputation was increasingly at risk.
The executive team recognized the urgency of the situation: if they couldn't rebuild trust between managers and their teams, cultural change would stall completely. But previous attempts at traditional leadership training had fallen flat. Generic programs failed to address the specific day-to-day leadership behaviors that needed changing, and couldn't rebuild credibility with a workforce that had already lost faith.
The company took a different path by implementing Grow. Rather than treating leadership development as a standalone activity disconnected from employee experience, Grow embedded development directly in the real experiences of employees.
The platform drew insights from engagement surveys, 360 feedback, and continuous listening to pinpoint exactly which leadership behaviors were doing the most harm, and where the greatest opportunities for repair existed. This data-driven approach revealed distinct patterns across the organization:
- In one factory division, feedback showed widespread issues with psychological safety and a lack of voice — people were afraid to speak candidly to their managers.
- In another division, teams craved clarity and consistency — leaders weren't communicating expectations clearly, and accountability felt arbitrary.
Grow used these insights to deliver targeted, behaviorally informed nudges and personalized AI coaching to over 800 managers across the organization. Unlike generic leadership tips, these interventions showed up directly in managers' workflow, helping them have better check-ins, communicate expectations more transparently, and encourage team voice without defensiveness.
Because AI Coach was connected to the EX dataset, it could deliver coaching that specifically addressed the issues most important to the company's teams and business priorities. Coaching wasn't just personalized to individual managers — it was purposeful, focused on what mattered most to employees and the business.
Within just six months, the company saw clear signals of progress:
- Engagement scores rose significantly in divisions previously flagged for psychological safety issues,
- Attrition slowed in critical engineering and manufacturing roles, providing stability in key positions,
- More employees reported confidence in raising concerns directly with their leaders, indicating improving psychological safety, and
- HR had clear, trackable evidence linking leadership behavior change to business impact, for the first time.
Most importantly, the initiative began rebuilding the fractured trust between managers and teams. Rather than receiving generic leadership training disconnected from their daily challenges, managers received practical guidance directly relevant to their teams' needs. This relevance drove unusually high adoption rates among managers, creating a virtuous cycle of improvement visible throughout the organization.
The Difference That Makes the Difference
What makes Grow fundamentally different is that it's not just personalized – it's "experience-aware." Built on the Perceptyx listening and action platform, Grow understands how teams are feeling, what behaviors are holding them back, and which cultural priorities matter most.
This integration enables Grow to foster trust through leadership development that's:
- Personalized to each manager's unique strengths and opportunities,
- Purposeful in targeting behaviors with the greatest business impact,
- Practical with guidance that integrates into daily workflow,
- Persistent through continuous reinforcement that drives lasting change, and
- Proven to drive measurable improvements in team performance and business outcomes.
Grow demonstrates that effective development doesn't require more time — just smarter, more targeted approaches that meet managers where they are.
Transform the Forgotten Middle
At a moment when organizations face unprecedented talent challenges, the "forgotten middle" of management represents both the greatest vulnerability and the greatest opportunity. By transforming how we develop these critical leaders, we can drive engagement, retention, and performance from the inside out.
Grow helps organizations take measurable, meaningful action – and gives managers at all levels the tools they need to lead effectively, develop continuously, and create the kind of team experiences that drive lasting business success.
Grow with Perceptyx
Ready to transform your approach to leadership development? Download our comprehensive white paper, The Future of Leadership Development: AI-Driven Manager Enablement, to learn how organizations are moving from episodic training to continuous, personalized support that drives meaningful change. To learn even more, schedule a demo to learn how Grow can help your organization unleash the full potential of your management team.
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