Across industries, the most effective leaders acknowledge their frontline workers as their most valuable asset. Those same leaders also realize that superb frontline managers play an oversized role in protecting this asset.

This has been borne out by numerous studies, including an important 2023 survey of 11,000 workers from the United States and seven other countries.

Released in December 2023, the survey from BCG found that the quality of frontline management has a huge impact on several critical factors—including employee motivation, job satisfaction, and retention—that impact the bottom line.

“[W]hen employees who are very satisfied with their managers [were compared] with those who are very unsatisfied,” the survey showed, the great managers were associated with:

• a more-than 300% increase in employee motivation,
• a nearly 1,400% increase in employee job satisfaction, and
• a 72% decrease in employee attrition.

In other words, strong managers produce strong results.