Strategies for Tracking Manager Effectiveness After Onboarding

Manager effectiveness is one of the most strategic investments HR leaders can make. Effective managers boost engagement, drive retention, and lead high-performing teams. But great managers aren’t born—they’re developed, supported, and continuously evaluated.

Many organizations begin this process by implementing robust manager onboarding programs designed to set expectations, introduce leadership frameworks, and help new managers step into their roles more confidently. 

While strong onboarding is essential—especially for first-time managers—it’s not enough. Without a system to continuously track and support manager effectiveness, HR leaders miss key opportunities to intervene early and guide long-term success.

The good news is that modern performance management software makes it easier than ever to evaluate and improve manager effectiveness in a strategic, scalable way. 

With tools like real-time feedback, check-ins, goal tracking, and manager coaching, HR teams are able to deliver the right support at the right time to ensure that manager effectiveness continues to improve over time, not just during onboarding.

In this blog post, we’ll cover:

• How to measure manager onboarding effectiveness
• Why manager onboarding is just the first step in a larger strategy
• How to measure manager effectiveness, including which metrics to track
• How to improve manager effectiveness
• The role technology can play in measuring manager effectiveness
• What effective manager support looks like in practice and how to scale it

Why is Manager Onboarding Important?

A manager’s first few months in the role can define their trajectory and the impact they’ll have on their team. That’s why manager onboarding plays such a critical role in shaping long-term outcomes. It’s not just about teaching managers systems and policies, it’s about preparing them to lead well in the context of your unique organization. 

What makes a manager successful can vary from company to company, depending on culture, leadership expectations, and team dynamics. Onboarding is your opportunity to align new managers with those expectations from the very start.

Setting Up Managers for Success

Effective manager onboarding provides clarity around expectations, introduces key leadership frameworks, and helps managers understand their role in ensuring alignment with organizational goals. 

For first-time managers especially, this onboarding experience may be the first time they’ve been taught how to be an effective manager, from setting goals and giving effective feedback to fostering psychological safety on their teams. 

When done well, manager onboarding will help managers:

• Understand what success looks like in their role
• Learn how to manage performance, growth, and development
• Build trust and psychological safety with their teams
• Feel equipped to make informed decisions
• Connect their role to the broader organizational mission
• Navigate tools and systems with confidence

How to Measure Onboarding Success

How do you know if your manager onboarding program is actually working?

A strong onboarding program shouldn’t just be a box you check. It should be a launchpad for confident leadership, team alignment, and long-term growth. That means defining what success looks like, tracking progress over time, and refining your onboarding approach based on the data.

Here are a few onboarding effectiveness metrics HR leaders can focus on:

• Time-to-productivity: How long does it take for new managers to confidently jump in and lead their teams?
• Early team engagement scores: Are direct reports feeling supported and aligned under a new manager?
• Goal alignment: Are managers quickly establishing and tracking goals that align with organization-wide objectives?
• Attrition rate: Are newly onboarded managers leaving the organization within their first 6-12 months as a manager?

Beyond these metrics, be sure to collect qualitative feedback from all angles. You can survey managers on how effective they felt their onboarding experience was, but you can also get further feedback through pulse surveys and check-ins from the managers themselves and their direct reports.

When evaluating the effectiveness of manager onboarding, it’s helpful to have organizational benchmarks for leadership success so you know what you’re measuring against. Then, you can clearly identify whether new managers are on track, exceeding expectations, or need additional support.

Why Onboarding Alone Isn’t Enough

Manager onboarding is crucial, but even the best onboarding program can’t cover everything that a new leader will face or provide the consistent support that managers need to succeed. Once the structure and support of onboarding fade, many managers are left to navigate on their own, often without clear guidance or feedback loops. 

That’s where problems start. Because without a framework for tracking and supporting manager effectiveness, new managers may:

• Default to outdated or ineffective management styles
• Struggle to provide meaningful, actionable feedback to their direct reports
• Solely prioritize task completion over team development
• Feel isolated and/or unsure of whether or not they are succeeding

This is why ongoing support for managers is essential. 

To truly enable manager success over the long term, HR leaders must move beyond relying on one-time onboarding programs and occasional performance reviews. They must implement systems that deliver continuous, real-time insights into manager effectiveness, that help spot gaps and challenges early, and that guide targeted development.

How Improving Manager Effectiveness Impacts Your Organization

When HR leaders prioritize manager effectiveness evaluation, they don’t just support managers. They strengthen every layer of the organization. Consider it an amplifier investment. When you invest in manager effectiveness, you’re also fueling higher engagement, stronger retention, better performance, and a healthier culture across the board.

Effective managers will:

• Align teams to strategic priorities
• Foster clarity around roles, expectations, and outcomes
• Proactively address challenges before they escalate
• Increase accountability and performance through regular goal tracking
• Drive innovation by creating psychologically safe environments
• Improve cross-functional collaboration
• Recognize wins and motivate their team members through meaningful feedback

On the flip side, the cost of poor management is steep. 

Disengaged teams, misaligned goals, and regrettable turnover can drain company resources and erode morale. That’s why investing in manager enablement is also investing in the long-term health of the business.

How Leading Organizations Are Elevating Manager Effectiveness with 15Five

Across industries, companies are realizing the value of investing in manager effectiveness. Here’s how three organizations saw meaningful results by investing in structured manager enablement with 15Five:

• At Core Medical Group, over 35% of managers reported improvements in team engagement, performance, and retention after gaining access to more consistent training and feedback tools.

• In a challenging market, Houwzer focused on upskilling managers to drive resilience and alignment. As a result, managers were better equipped to lead through uncertainty, and Houwzer achieved over 70% of their Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) being “on track” for attainment, demonstrating improved goal alignment and managerial effectiveness.

• Pendo launched a manager enablement initiative that included onboarding 163 managers. The result was a 21% reduction in turnover, high engagement scores, and a 99% adoption rate for performance reviews.

Key Performance Metrics for Manager Effectiveness

How do you evaluate manager performance? The first step is defining what “effective” actually looks like and then tracking it.

Of course, the definition of a successful manager can vary from organization to organization and even from team to team. But there are a few indicators that tend to offer universal insight into the level of manager effectiveness:

Team goal completion rate

The percentage of team goals achieved can offer a direct window into how well a manager is guiding their team to accomplish what they’re setting out to accomplish. A consistently low goal completion rate could point to poor coaching, lack of proper prioritization, and/or misaligned expectations.

Check-in completion rates

Regular check-ins between managers and their teams are foundational to consistent engagement and alignment. Tracking how often members are completing check-ins can provide insight into how well a manager is communicating the value of these touchpoints. Furthermore, tracking how often the manager is reviewing these check-ins can signal how actively managers are engaging with their team’s needs and whether they’re using the tool as intended to support performance, morale, and development.

1-on-1 Frequency 

Check-ins are great for quick updates between managers and their direct reports, but 1-on-1s are where the real coaching and development takes place. Tracking 1-on-1 frequency can give insight into whether or not managers are creating adequate space for deeper conversations around goals and growth. 

If the 1-on-1 frequency rate drops, it could indicate that managers themselves are overwhelmed and struggling to find or create the time to hold these meetings. And if that pattern continues, it can erode trust, stall employee development, and lead to widespread disengagement.

Team Engagement Levels 

Engagement is one of the clearest indicators of manager effectiveness, and viewing engagement scores by team can help to pinpoint whether a manager is creating a team environment where employees are engaged and thriving or identify teams where morale may be slipping. 

Retention and Turnover Trends

Tracking employee retention data on a team level is another useful data point for evaluating manager effectiveness. If, for example, a particular team is experiencing a higher-than-average turnover rate, it’s worth exploring whether there’s a manager issue that is causing this spike. 

Additionally, gathering exit data from employees who are leaving can help HR leaders identify patterns and make proactive changes to prevent turnover from rising even further.

Leadership Development and Internal Mobility

Managers aren’t just there to make sure work gets done — they’re key players in developing future leaders, and the data should reflect that. Their effectiveness at doing so can be measured by tracking how many team members on a given team are being promoted or tapped for new internal opportunities. 

How to Use Technology to Track Manager Effectiveness

Once you’ve identified what effective management looks like and the metrics you want to track, the next step is making sure you have the right tools in place to actually measure them and make meaning of the results.

A tech-enabled approach allows HR teams to evaluate manager effectiveness in real time, spot gaps early, and deliver targeted support when it’s needed most. It also helps managers build better habits and stay accountable.

Here’s what a tech-enabled approach to tracking manager effectiveness should include:

• Access to real-time performance data: In order to get an accurate picture of manager effectiveness, HR teams need visibility into day-to-day leadership behaviors and outcomes. The HR tech stack should enable the capturing of both quantitative and qualitative data, such as frequency and quality of 1-on-1 meetings, goal setting and tracking behaviors, team check-in engagement, and recognition given and received.
• Consistent feedback loops: We’ve established that manager enablement should be a continuous process, so your HR tech stack should support that process. That means having tools that enable regular feedback from both direct reports and peers to identify blind spots and surface opportunities for growth and development. When this multidirectional feedback is paired with manager self-assessments, HR teams are able to get a more 360-degree view of manager effectiveness.
• Analytics that tie manager performance to business outcomes. Tracking various metrics around manager effectiveness doesn’t mean much if there’s not a clear understanding of how those metrics tie to broader organizational goals like team engagement, retention, and productivity. Ideally, your HR tech stack will centralize and draw connections between data to help you evaluate manager performance in the context of the entire business.
• AI-powered insights that surface patterns: Artificial intelligence and machine learning are increasingly valuable in helping HR teams analyze onboarding data at scale. These tools can automatically identify patterns, such as which onboarding experiences correlate with long-term manager effectiveness or which managers struggle to ramp up their teams successfully. AI can also surface predictive insights, helping HR teams intervene earlier when onboarding isn’t translating to strong performance.

15Five: Where Manager Support Meets Measurable Impact

There are many tools that attempt to track manager effectiveness, but most fall short when it comes to offering actionable insights and ongoing support.

15Five is the performance management platform that is purpose-built to support manager enablement in a holistic, measurable, and scalable way. 

• The Manager Effectiveness Indicator (MEI) synthesizes real-time performance data and employee feedback to give HR teams a clear view of how managers are performing and where support is needed.

• Check-ins and 1-on-1s create continuous feedback loops that keep managers aligned with their teams’ progress and accountable to best practices

• Transform provides more in-depth support through on-demand training, live coaching, and AI-powered insights and assistance

• The HR Outcomes Dashboard centralizes many of the key metrics that serve as indicators of manager effectiveness, like engagement, retention, performance, and more. This helps HR leaders better understand how these data points connect, how they impact broader organizational goals, and where to focus for the greatest impact.

Empower your managers for success

Manager onboarding is a strong start, but real, lasting impact comes from continuous manager enablement. Great leadership isn’t built in a single training. It’s shaped over time through consistent feedback, meaningful support, and the right systems to guide growth.

With clear metrics and the right tools in place, HR teams can shift from reacting to issues after they arise to proactively developing managers who inspire, align, and elevate their teams.

Want to get a better picture of what this looks like in action? Schedule a demo today to see how 15Five’s Manager Enablement tools can help your managers thrive before, during, and long after onboarding.