The Manager’s Lottery: Why Your Best People Are Being Overlooked
Businesses are investing more in workplace technology than ever before. And yet, in most UK organisations, the single biggest factor determining whether a talented employee gets developed, promoted, or even noticed is something far less sophisticated: which manager they happen to report to. It is what amounts to a manager’s lottery. And it is costing businesses far more than they realise. The gut-instinct gap Recent YouGov research we commissioned, surveying 171 HR professionals across UK organisations, found that 68% of skills gaps are still being identified informally by line managers. Not through structured assessments, skills frameworks, or data analytics, but through observation, instinct, and whoever happens to be visible at the right moment. The same pattern plays out across other critical people decisions. Over half of employee sentiment signals surface through manager observation alone, and 35% of succession decisions are made informally. Meanwhile, 27% of internal op...