How skills intelligence helps managers lead with clarity and confidence

In 2024, manager engagement fell to 27% from 30% the year before, with the largest drop seen among young managers and female managers, according to Gallup’s State Of The Global Workplace 2025 report. This decline was higher than the 2% year-on-year drop in overall employee engagement, which stood at 21% in 2024. If managers are disengaged and burned out, their teams are no better off because 70% of team engagement is credited to managers, the Gallup study adds.

Why are managers crashing and burning? Too much work, too little support, barely any real training to prepare them for their responsibilities – the list of reasons goes on. Managers – be they front-line managers, middle managers, or executives – are a company’s backbone. Should they falter, it will have a disastrous effect on employee performance and engagement as well as overall productivity and organisational growth.

To lead effectively, managers need more than instincts and experience – they need clear visibility into employee skills: their own, their team’s, and their organisation’s. Skills intelligence provides that visibility. It helps managers make better decisions, build stronger teams, plan development paths, and identify internal growth opportunities. In this article, we explore how applying skills intelligence helps managers succeed in their roles and develop into better managers too. We’ll also look at how MuchSkills – a skills intelligence and management platform – supports organisations in cultivating skilled, confident, and future-ready leaders.

Manager crash is real

Burnout is not just a buzz word. It has found a place in the World Health Organisation’s ‘International Classification of Diseases’. While not exactly categorised as an illness, burnout is serious and characterised by exhaustion or energy depletion, negative feelings toward one’s job, and a loss of professional efficacy.

Stress makes people, especially those in leadership positions, indecisive and unconfident, which often leads to poor choices and missed opportunities. Burned out leaders fail to lead their teams well and rally their support when it matters most. 

The consequences of stress and burnout go beyond poor decision-making – they also contribute to a widening gap between what employees expect from their managers and what they actually receive. Managers are expected to lead with empathy. Yet, only 45% of employees surveyed by Deloitte’s 2021 Global Ways of Working Study said their managers demonstrated this quality. Another study, Microsoft’s 2022 Work Trend Index Special Report, stated that 81% of employees expected their managers to help them manage their workload, but only 31% admitted to getting clear guidance from their managers. Clearly, managers are failing to live up to these great expectations.

Even as companies increasingly transition into skills-based organisations, many managers shockingly lack awareness and knowledge of the skills and competencies their teams possess and those they are missing. Such managers are blind to the skills gaps lurking in the workforce that could prove detrimental in the long run. Such obliviousness makes them incapable of deploying people effectively or inspiring those they lead. Ultimately, they can only watch as their best performers leave.

This lack of awareness isn’t just a minor oversight; it’s a critical roadblock to building high-performing teams and aligning them with business goals. To overcome this challenge, managers need tools that offer clear visibility into team skills and competencies, enabling them to make informed decisions with confidence. That’s where MuchSkills comes in.

How MuchSkills helps managers lead with clarity and confidence

MuchSkills equips managers with real-time insights into team strengths, skill gaps, and talent risks – enabling evidence-based decisions about role allocation, project planning, and team development. With this clarity, managers can act faster, lead more effectively, and align their teams with organisational priorities.

MuchSkills equips managers with the clarity they need to lead smarter. They spend less time second-guessing and more time making confident, data-informed decisions – reducing overload and improving outcomes. The result? Smarter team planning, more effective strategic workforce planning, higher engagement, and a workforce that’s better aligned to business goals.

Here's how MuchSkills can help managers:

1. Skills visibility at your fingertips

Thanks to its skills and competency mapping features, MuchSkills provides a clear, real-time view of team capabilities — including skills and competencies, proficiency levels, certifications, and growth aspirations. With this overview, managers can ensure the right people are in the right roles, better plan staffing for projects, and guide employee development — resulting in more productive, agile, and engaged teams.

2. Skills gap analysis

Instantly identify skills and skill gaps across individuals, teams, or departments. With MuchSkills detailed team insights, managers can make data-driven decisions to optimise team composition, align skills with project demands, and ensure the workforce has the skills for both current and future demands. By linking these insights to targeted learning resources and role-specific learning paths, organisations can close skill gaps faster, optimise the workforce, and build a more capable, agile, and high-performing organisation. Check out our complete guide on conducting a skills gap analysis here.

3. Optimised resource allocation

MuchSkills gives users access to a range of workforce and talent insights, skill gap and utilisation reports based on your organisation’s skills intelligence data. Use these reports to allocate resources with precision – ensuring the right people are matched to the right roles based on real-time data on skills, proficiency, and availability; instantly assess whether your team has the capabilities needed for a project or client engagement; and receive smart suggestions for the best-fit internal candidates. By reducing bench time, avoiding under- or overutilisation, and supporting internal mobility, MuchSkills helps you optimise workforce planning and drive smarter, and more strategic workforce decisions.

4. Enable internal mobility

A LinkedIn study found that employees who make internal moves are 40% more likely to stay – proving the long-term impact of strategic, internal mobility. MuchSkills features a built-in internal talent marketplace that makes it easy to match employees to new opportunities within the organisation based on their skills, interests, and aspirations. This supports career growth without requiring them to look elsewhere – boosting engagement, reducing turnover, and lowering recruitment costs. 

To wrap up, with the help of employee skills mapping and analysis software such as MuchSkills, managers can make informed, data-driven decisions leading to positive outcomes. This boosts their confidence, makes them adept at leading teams and managing projects, and effective in creating a fair and inspiring work culture. What’s more, they can face challenges and technological disruptions better.

The journey from manager to leader

Managers play a critical role in team performance, talent retention, and business success – but they’re often expected to figure things out on their own. Like most skills, leadership isn’t always instinctive. It needs to be developed. Yet many organisations set their managers up to fail by expecting them to lead effectively without giving them the tools, training, or support to grow into their roles. Here are some common ways organisations hinder manager development:

• Promoting managers based on individual performance rather than leadership potential. A strong performance in sales doesn’t necessarily make one a good team leader or department head.
• Lack of formal training. According to Capterra’s 2023 Middle Manager Survey, just 37% of middle managers said they received managerial training when they came into their roles while 74% said they “rarely” or “never” received managerial training afterwards.
• Outdated performance management processes that limit managers to holding annual employee assessments and providing one-sided feedback. As managers remain out of touch with reality, they can do little to support employee development.
• Resistance to skills-based leadership development among managers themselves, some of whom may view training opportunities as an additional burden on their already full work schedule.    

Caught between executing their superiors’ orders and mentoring and leading their direct reports, it’s no wonder that 30% of middle managers are unhappy in their current roles and actively looking for new jobs.

This is where MuchSkills comes in. MuchSkills gives managers access to the skills intelligence, tools, and guidance they need to lead effectively, grow professionally, and unlock the full potential of their teams. 

How MuchSkills can help you become a better manager and leader

Managing communication and setting goals

Communication is key to leading teams, mentoring people, achieving goals, hitting targets, and resolving conflicts. Research has shown that managers who communicate with team members regularly make a greater impact because their advice is timely and meaningful. 

Our award-winning playbooks for managers on how to conduct one-on-one meetings and hold regular check-ins are designed to improve employee performance and engagement and, by extension, create strong and effective leaders. Managers are also responsible for pushing their teams to do their best. To help them achieve this, we have useful guides to goal-setting, team-building, and team empowerment too.

Internal talent mobility for managers

Internal mobility opportunities are just as critical for managers and leaders as they are for other employees. They enable them to explore opportunities to lead diverse teams, take on cross-functional projects, secure promotions, and develop their leadership skills. Research shows that employees who move internally, including those in leadership roles, are more likely to be high performers and less likely to leave than external hires.

MuchSkills facilitates internal mobility for managers by providing tailored insights into roles and projects that align with their unique skills, competencies, and leadership aspirations. Managers can also use MuchSkills to discover roles that match their goals and interests, gain access to relevant learning materials, and assess whether they possess the leadership skills needed to succeed in those roles through guided self-assessments.

This empowers managers to take ownership of their growth and continue progressing within the organisation — while helping businesses retain and elevate high-potential leadership talent.

Conclusion

Managers are central to an organisation’s success — they drive performance, engagement, and retention. When they struggle, the teams they lead often struggle too. It’s time to give managers the recognition and support they deserve: from formal training and opportunities for growth to internal mobility and the right skills management and performance management tools. On their journey to becoming stronger, more effective leaders, they can count on skills management software like MuchSkills as trusted allies.