This isn’t a new revelation, but it’s helpful to see research to back up how important good managers are:

Managers play a crucial role in shaping an employee’s experience. For example, research shows that nearly 70% of the variability in employee engagement can be predicted by their managers’ behavior, decisions, and personality traits. In other words, whether people are happy, energized, or miserable at work depends mostly on their boss—and whether or not they’re an incompetent manager.

The article goes on to talk about the well-known Peter Principle, which states that “employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent”:

One of the core mechanisms behind the Peter Principle is the gap between the skills needed in junior technical roles and those newly and additionally required in senior and managerial positions. To improve the promotion system, especially for significant promotions for team leader or line manager roles, it’s essential to consider a person’s past performance or technical expertise and leadership potential, such as collaboration experience or services to the team. Organizations can counteract the Peter Principle through comprehensive training programs that equip employees with necessary competencies, such as people management skills, strategic thinking, and emotional intelligence before promoting them to managerial roles.

It’s mind-boggling how often organizations promote individual contributors into manager roles without any training at all. This is a major contributing factor to the Director problem so many orgs are battling with right now:

Your organization will succeed or fail on the basis of your director layer. And in most organizations, that layer is a mess right now.