An HR Director at a food manufacturer walks into budget review with a manager program she knows is working. Supervisors seem more confident. A couple of plant managers have said nice things about it. Then the CFO asks what it did to turnover, and she doesn't have a number.
The program survives this year. She knows it might not survive the next one.
Measuring leadership development ROI is hard to do after the fact. It gets much easier if you decide what you're measuring before anyone sits down for the first session.
Most HR leaders are confident in their programs and can't show the numbers
The gap between belief and evidence is wide. A Betterworks survey of 934 HR and business leaders found about 85% were highly confident performance management advances their organization's priorities. Only 44% could back that with business metrics. Fewer than one in four HR professionals could provide engagement metrics.
Betterworks called it "high confidence with low evidence." Any HR leader who has sat across from a skeptical finance team knows exactly what that feels like.
Pick the three numbers you'd want to show the CFO and pull this year's baseline now — before the program starts, not after.
Almost no one has connected manager development to retention
Retention is the number executives care about most, and it's the one HR measures least when it comes to managers. Manager Method's 2026 State of Management report found only 7% of organizations have measured their managers' impact on retention. Fifty-four percent don't measure whether manager development works at all.
That's a problem, because the link between managers and team outcomes is well documented. Gallup's research attributes 70% of the variance in team engagement to the manager. If HR can't show that connection in its own data, the program looks optional.
Pick three to five numbers before anyone attends anything
The simplest fix is to choose your metrics up front and take a baseline. Betterworks recommends HR identify three to five measurable organizational outcomes and report progress against them — and that advice applies cleanly to manager development.
For a manufacturing or CPG company, good candidates are turnover on the teams of participating managers, how often "my manager" shows up as a reason in exit interviews, engagement scores for those teams, and how much HR time goes to issues managers should be handling. Pull the last six to twelve months for each before the program starts. Then compare participants' teams against similar teams whose managers weren't in the program.
Pick numbers you can actually get. A metric that requires a new system to track will get dropped by month two.
Track behavior change along with business results
Business outcomes take time to move, so you also need evidence that managers are doing something different in the meantime. Ask participants and their direct reports a few specific questions every month or two. Is the manager giving feedback sooner? Are one-on-ones actually happening? Are problems getting handled before they reach HR?
Those answers give you something to report in the first quarter, while turnover and engagement data catch up.
How Groveland builds measurement into the program from the start
Groveland Leadership works with HR to define clear metrics for success before the program begins. Groveland then tracks participant progress against those metrics and gathers qualitative feedback along the way. The outcomes Groveland is built to move are the ones executives ask about — especially manager turnover and team engagement.
The program itself is designed to change behavior, which is what makes it measurable. Leaders meet weekly for one hour in peer groups of 3 to 4 with a trained Groveland Lead Coach and work on real situations from their own teams. Because they report back each week on what they tried, there's a running record of what changed. Cohorts run three months, with up to three cohorts over nine months, so there's time for results to show up in the data.
Groveland also works alongside your existing L&D programs and runs as a turnkey service, which matters for HR teams that don't have time to build a measurement plan from scratch.
Frequently Asked Questions
Start by picking three to five business outcomes — like turnover on participants' teams and engagement scores — and pull a baseline before the program begins. Compare those numbers over time against similar teams whose managers didn't participate.
Turnover and its replacement cost are usually the most persuasive, because they convert directly to dollars. Engagement and exit interview trends help explain why turnover is moving.
Behavior changes can show up within the first few months if managers are practicing weekly. Turnover and engagement usually take two or three quarters to move in a way you can report with confidence.
Yes. Most companies already have turnover data, exit interview notes, and an engagement survey. The work is pulling a baseline before the program and checking it on a set schedule.
Usually because nobody set the metrics before the program started, so there's no baseline to compare against. HR teams are also stretched, and measurement gets pushed aside by daily issues.
Sources: HR Dive, "HR leaders feel positive about their outlook, but can't back it up with numbers" (Oct 13, 2026) | Manager Method, 2026 State of Management Report | Gallup, "How Managers Impact Team Productivity"