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The downstream effect of these changes on managers is that they must now take on a broader and more complex array of responsibilities. Take, for example, a large South African gaming company that experienced simultaneous workforce and digital transformations. The company's growth ushered in an increasingly young and diverse workforce and a less tenured management layer. As Steve Howell, the director of the organization's learning and development function, described to us, "Twenty or thirty years ago a slot machine at a casino was a mechanical device and it's now a computer We now rely ninety percent on technical capability. To be a good manager in gaming and even hotels you have to be technically proficient." In other words, managers at the casino are faced with the daunting challenge of learning new technologies themselves while simultaneously coaching their teams on these new skills.

IBM has faced similar challenges as it continues to transform its business portfolio. When we spoke to Jason Trujillo, vice president of Leadership and Learning Development at IBM, he told us half of the organization's revenue is coming from businesses that didn't even exist five years ago. This meant readying IBM's more than 350,000-member workforce for skills for the future and redesign how they work to drive innovation and client engagement. Such ongoing and large-scale organizational changes don't just affect the way business is done. They are also a driving force behind the massive and ongoing shifts in the skills employees need to succeed—and by proxy, the skills managers need to manage.

A NEW MANAGER MANDATE

Above and beyond the stress managers experience in grappling with their own shifting responsibilities, they also need to respond to employees who are concerned about their skills becoming irrelevant. In fact, with the changes resulting from digitalization and organizational transformation, employees cite the need for better upskilling as their top concern. In one of our recent surveys, when we asked more than seven thousand employees throughout the world

what they needed to aptly manage change, the top two responses were "need more upskilling" and "need to be able to work faster." As technology takes further hold of companies' workflows, artificial intelligence and new technologies are not only changing the capabilities employees need, but they are also transforming how companies operate. When we surveyed employees about the skills most critical to their success today and then asked how effective they felt at performing those same skills, 70 percent told us they haven't mastered the skills they need for their current job.

Stop and think about this statistic. This essentially shows that a large portion of your staff are not sufficiently equipped to be successful in their jobs. It's critically important to prepare employees with the skills they need for today and tomorrow—we call this measure skills preparedness. Skills are the currency employees use to do their jobs and define their future roles. When employees have high skills preparedness, organizations perform better. In fact, boosting employee skills preparedness helps organizations close talent gaps with internal talent more quickly. Employees with high skills preparedness perform up to 45 percent better, display up to 51 percent more discretionary effort, and are up to 45 percent more engaged than employees with low skills preparedness.

Why does employee skills preparedness matter for managers? The snowballing effect of digitalization on work and changing employee skill needs translates into a new manager mandate: to act as a central source for upskilling employees in real time to meet current and future skill needs. Corporate communications and trainings pass through managers, making them conduits for implementing change, so it shouldn't be a surprise that there's one task in particular that is gaining tremendous focus in most organizations globally: providing continuous coaching and development. And this focus makes sense given how our research shows that coaching and development have more impact on an employee's performance than other manager activities, such as good project management or strategic communication. We also find that providing feedback to employees improves their performance when employees consider and act on the feedback.

Senior executives are asking managers to coach even more to help employees and organizations keep up. In fact, when we surveyed human resources (HR) executives and asked how much managers should coach today, they estimated that they should be spending a whopping 30 percent of their time coaching and developing employees. That's a pretty hefty ask. In a global environment characterized by everyday upheaval, can managers really be a step ahead and a measure more involved with each direct report? John Wilson, group talent and leadership manager at NFU Mutual, put it well when he expressed the challenge to us in an interview, saying, "Over time, expectations of managers have grown significantly. They are asked to lead and advocate change, run business as usual, satisfy increasing external regulation AND coach and develop their teams. So, from a manager's perspective, understanding how best to prioritize their time is increasingly difficult." When we looked at how much time managers actually spend coaching, it was a mere 10 percent of their time—a much different picture from what business leaders envisioned. The ask on managers to coach and develop more comes from a genuine interest in helping employees adapt to the dynamic demands of work, and enhance the overall talent and financial performance of their businesses. But the gap between the perceived amount of time managers should spend coaching and the amount of time they actually spend coaching is a problem.