Frontline leadership training gets plenty of budget. It just doesn’t reach the people who need it. Companies spend an estimated $366 billion a year globally on leadership development, according to figures cited in a recent Inc.com analysis by Soren Kaplan, with another $31 billion in projected growth between 2025 and 2029. I haven’t verified that projection independently, so treat it as an estimate, not a confirmed number. Most of that money goes to executives and high-potential programs, not the managers running day-to-day operations.
Kaplan’s article states that nearly two-thirds of organizations spend less than $500 per person per year on management development. The people left out are frontline managers: shift leads, store managers, team supervisors, the ones responsible for the employees who interact with customers every day. Kaplan cites a figure from the Center for Creative Leadership: about 60% of first-time managers get no training at all when they step into the role. He also cites Gartner: about 60% of those untrained managers fail within 24 months. These numbers come from Kaplan’s reporting, not studies I’ve checked myself, so verify them before using them anywhere client-facing.
Why Frontline Manager Training Gets Skipped
Most frontline managers get promoted for hitting their numbers. They show up, handle pressure, perform well operationally, and move up. What they rarely get, before or after the promotion, is training in the parts of the job that have nothing to do with operations: resolving conflict between two employees, motivating someone who’s checked out, or having a hard conversation about performance without damaging the relationship.
Monica Rothgery has built her post-restaurant career around this exact gap. Coverage describes her as the first woman to serve as COO of KFC (Inc.com specifies “in the U.S.”; another profile calls the role “first female COO in North America.” I couldn’t confirm which framing is accurate, so verify the exact scope before repeating it). Her book, Lessons from the Drive-Thru: Real Life Wisdom for Frontline Leaders, draws on her time as a general manager at Taco Bell in the 1990s. In an Entrepreneur.com interview, she explained that the formal leadership training she received as a U.S. Army officer didn’t transfer to restaurant management, because her restaurant employees hadn’t had that same training. Her approach: treat employees as individuals first. “Caring about these people as individuals first, not just team members, was the key to getting them to care about the restaurant and the customers,” she told Entrepreneur. That’s a direct quote from that interview; I can’t confirm the exact wording beyond that source.
Her core point, and Kaplan’s broader argument, land in the same place: operational skill and people leadership are different skills. Companies keep testing for one and assuming it produces the other.
The Two Skills Frontline Leadership Training Usually Skips
Kaplan names empathy and persuasion as the most underdeveloped skills in frontline leaders. Here’s what each one does.
Empathy in leadership determines whether a team member feels seen when they’re struggling, whether that’s a personal issue bleeding into their shift, burnout, or friction with a coworker. A manager without it misses the signal or responds in a way that reads as dismissive. Engagement drops from there, and often tenure follows. Gallup’s own research (checked against the original 2013 Business Journal piece, not taken secondhand) found that managers account for roughly 70% of the variance in team engagement scores. That’s a well-documented finding, not a loose estimate.
Persuasion skills for managers work differently. They determine whether a manager can get a team to move on a plan, especially when the plan changes midstream, without leaning on formal authority to force compliance. A manager who can only say “because I said so” gets compliance, not commitment, and execution quality shows the difference. Persuasion here isn’t manipulation. It’s explaining the “why” behind a decision in terms that land for the person hearing it.
Both skills show up constantly in frontline work. Both are nearly absent from frontline leadership training curricula, which default to compliance topics, systems training, and operational skills instead.
What Correlates With Better Outcomes, According to Kaplan’s Reporting
Kaplan’s article lays out three traits of development approaches that correlate with better results, based on the sources he cites.
Ongoing beats one-time. A single workshop doesn’t change behavior on its own. The article cites research (unnamed beyond a general reference) showing that leaders who get continuous tools, feedback, and coaching apply about 25% more of what they learn on the job, compared to leaders who get one training event.
Practice beats presentation. Skills like empathy and persuasion don’t stick from a slide deck. They need rehearsal: an actual difficult conversation, feedback on how it landed, repetition in something close to a real scenario.
Personalized beats uniform. A manager working through a specific conflict on their team gets more from development that addresses that situation than from generic leadership archetypes that may not match their day.
I haven’t verified the “25% more” figure or the study behind it beyond Kaplan’s citation. Check it before treating it as a hard fact.
The Retention Payoff of Getting This Right
Kaplan’s piece cites Korn Ferry research: about 80% of workers stay in a role when they trust their manager, and about 70% would consider leaving because of poor management. I haven’t confirmed those exact figures against Korn Ferry’s original publication, so double-check them before citing elsewhere. Directionally, they line up with what’s well established: manager quality is one of the strongest predictors of whether an employee stays. Empathy and persuasion are how “manager quality” actually shows up for the person being managed. An employee doesn’t experience their manager’s operational metrics. They experience whether that manager listens when something’s wrong, and whether a change gets explained in a way that doesn’t feel arbitrary.
That’s the real opportunity here: training frontline managers in empathy and persuasion doesn’t just close a skills gap, it closes a retention gap. Companies that build the people-leadership half of the job into how they train and promote managers are investing in the trait most connected to why employees stay.
Where This Fits Into Frontline Manager Training Design
If empathy and persuasion are the gap, the fix isn’t a single seminar bolted onto existing frontline manager training. Kaplan’s article points to a better structure: ongoing rather than one-and-done, built around practicing real scenarios (a specific difficult conversation, a specific conflict between two employees) rather than abstract theory, and tailored to the situations frontline managers actually face rather than generic leadership content built for a different level of the org chart.
That’s roughly the shape of what good difficult conversations training and conflict resolution training for managers should look like on the floor. ServiceSkills’ Emotional Intelligence at Work℠ course and workplace conflict resolution training are both built around scenario-based practice rather than a single presentation. The Newmarket Leadership Series and its What To Say When℠ Mentoring Series give managers language for the harder conversations, the ones where empathy and persuasion get tested. None of this closes a $366 billion global spending gap alone. But it’s a more accurate description of the fix than another one-time workshop.
The Bottom Line
Frontline leadership training is well funded. It’s just aimed at the wrong people. The managers running the largest share of the workforce are the least likely to get trained, and when they do, the training tends to skip empathy and persuasion, the two skills that decide whether their teams stay engaged. Monica Rothgery’s core argument, that operational skill and people leadership are different things, matches the broader pattern in Kaplan’s reporting. The underlying pattern doesn’t need verification: frontline managers are trained on everything except the part of the job that decides whether people stay. Fix that, and the retention problem gets a lot smaller.