Where do your managers go for support and who's checking the advice they get?

The more I look at where managers turn for day-to-day support, the more concerned I become.

By “manager support”, I mean the quick advice a manager can grab when a people problem lands in their inbox that afternoon or comes up in conversation with one of their direct reports. Maybe someone’s off sick for the third week running, there’s a growing rift between two team members, or a performance issue has been flagged about someone on their team and they need to address it before too much distance between what happened and the conversation means it looks like it didn’t matter. A training course they sat through months ago doesn’t help very much in these moments.

When I ask managers where they turn or who they go to when they're struggling with something as per the examples I have just given above, there's usually a pause followed by a response such as, "I just work it out myself" or, increasingly, "ChatGPT?"

This doesn't just extend to inexperienced managers either. Often, the more senior someone becomes, the fewer people they feel comfortable asking. Managers, no matter their tenure are getting instant advice on their management challenges from somewhere. The trouble is that organisations often have no idea where it's coming from, whether it's any good, bad or indifferent and most importantly, whether the advice they're getting is sound or safe to act on.

Poor management support and advice has real consequences. A conversation handled badly can damage trust, undermine performance and turn a manageable issue into a much bigger problem. People disengage, good employees leave and situations that could have been resolved early escalate into grievances, absence and sometimes legal action. Not to mention that the cost to people and the business can be significant.

Why everyday manager support has disappeared

Hybrid working has taken away many of those informal moments when you could grab someone for five minutes, talk through a problem or watch an experienced colleague handle something difficult. At the same time, organisations have removed management layers, teams have grown and everyone's diary is full.

Meanwhile, managing people has become more complex. Managers are expected to support wellbeing, flexibility, development and performance, often across different locations and generations. We're asking more of managers while giving them less support, and when something difficult comes up we're leaving them to work it out for themselves.

Where do managers go for support? Six common routes

Managers face people challenges every day that don't come with straightforward answers. Some situations require an immediate response, while others need careful thought before deciding what to do. Formal training and development can help build the skills to navigate these challenges, but there will always be moments when managers need advice, reassurance or a fresh perspective on a specific situation.

When those moments arise, there are six common routes managers turn to for support, each with its own strengths and limitations.

1. Their own line manager: Potentially the best source of advice because they understand the business, know the people involved and can follow up. But they're often stretched, and many are accidental managers (promoted for being great at the job with no training for the people side) and aren't always someone a manager feels comfortable admitting uncertainty to.
2. HR: HR brings expertise on policy, employment law and difficult people issues, but with around two HR people for every 100 employees, it can't be available for every question. Some managers also avoid going to HR until a problem has escalated.
3. Peers: A great source of reassurance and shared experience, particularly when there's a structured network. The difficulty is that peers may be facing exactly the same challenges and passing on advice based on limited experience.
4. Friends and family: Good listeners, but they usually hear one side of the story and naturally want to support you rather than challenge your thinking. They also have little understanding of your organisation's policies or the wider context.
5. Unfiltered online communities: Accessible, often anonymous and full of different experiences. The r/managers Subreddit on Reddit alone has over 293,000 members at the time of writing this article. But advice from strangers comes with no accountability, little context and potential confidentiality risks.
6. Generic AI chatbots: Many managers are already turning to it. A Resume Builder survey of over 1,300 US managers found that six in ten use AI to help make decisions about their direct reports, including pay rises and promotions. It's available whenever they need it, it's patient and it can be useful for thinking through a problem or preparing for a conversation. But generic AI isn't a management coach. It draws on vast amounts of information, including content from across the internet, without necessarily distinguishing good management practice from poor advice. It can produce a convincing answer without asking the questions a skilled coach would ask first.

None of these are necessarily wrong. The concern is that managers are acting on advice without always knowing whether it's appropriate, and organisations have little to no visibility of what's influencing those decisions.

Of the six, online communities and AI chatbots are growing fastest, and both are digital. A manager can open either one at 11pm the night before a difficult conversation, and no one has checked the advice either gives. Managers need support, and increasingly they're searching for it through a screen. My argument is that we need to pay more attention to the quality of advice they're receiving, whether it comes from a person or a platform and ultimately whether it's helping them become better managers in the process.

What does good management support look like?

So how do we judge the advice they receive, wherever it comes from, human or digital?

That's where guardrails come in: a way of telling whether advice is any good, whether it's grounded in good practice, asks the right questions, is willing to challenge the manager's thinking and knows when a particular scenario might require specialist intervention.

For me, guardrails do two jobs. They stop poor advice getting through and they make sure the support managers receive encourages good management behaviours.

I'd want any source of support for managers to pass six tests.

1. Is it grounded in good management practice? Support needs to draw on proven management and coaching principles. An answer that sounds convincing isn't enough on its own.
2. Does it encourage the right management behaviours? Advice should reinforce good management habits, such as setting clear expectations and deliverables, delegating effectively, holding people accountable, giving constructive feedback and addressing performance issues early. Over time, it should help managers build these behaviours as well as solve the immediate problem.
3. Does it ask the right questions? Good coaching needs to understand the full picture before offering advice. That means asking the right questions about the situation, what's already been tried and the perspective of the person involved. It should challenge assumptions and consider how the manager's approach might affect that person's trust, wellbeing and performance.
4. Does it understand the manager themselves? Good coaching also needs to understand the person asking for help. Their strengths, development needs, motivations and typical management behaviours all influence how they approach a challenge. Two managers facing exactly the same situation may need very different support. One might lack confidence in having difficult conversations, while another might need to recognise they're being too controlling. Without that understanding, the advice stays generic and does little to help the manager develop.
5. Does it challenge rather than just agree? A good coach doesn't simply validate someone's thinking. They ask questions, challenge assumptions and help managers recognise when their own behaviour might be part of the problem. Sometimes the most helpful response is to question the approach before helping the manager carry it out.
6. Does it know its limits? Some situations need HR, a specialist or a human coach. Good support needs to recognise that and know when to step aside.

Confidentiality runs through all six. Managers need to know that what they're sharing about their people is being handled appropriately.

Of course, you can't put guardrails around every conversation a manager has with a colleague, friend or someone in an online community. Nor should you try to control every source of advice they turn to. But what if you could give managers a trusted, accessible source of support that meets these standards? Somewhere they can work through a challenge, question their own thinking and get guidance grounded in good management practice, whenever they need it.

AI has the potential to make that kind of support available at scale. But there's an important distinction between AI that's designed to develop better managers and generic AI that's simply designed to answer questions. And it's a distinction I'm increasingly focused on helping organisations understand.

Why generic AI advice is a risk for managers

Managers are already using AI for decisions that affect their teams and most haven't been trained to. In the Resume Builder survey, only a third of managers using AI had received formal training on its limitations. There's also the issue of AI telling us what we want to hear. A Stanford study published in Science found that leading AI models affirmed users' actions 49% more often than humans did, even when those actions were questionable or harmful.

Think about what that means in a management context. A manager describes a difficult employee, suggests how they're planning to handle the situation and gets back something like, "That's a really thoughtful approach." But what if it isn't? What if the manager has misunderstood what's happening, is being unfair or is about to make the situation worse?

Having spent over 20 years coaching managers, I know reassurance has its place and so does challenge. Often, that's where the real development happens. Sometimes a manager needs someone to help them see what they're missing.

That's what worries me about "unguardrailed" AI. It can be incredibly useful. But when managers are using it to make decisions that affect other people's working lives, we need to be much more thoughtful about the quality of the support they're receiving.

Coaching for managers: four levels and where AI fits

I find it useful to think about coaching outcomes at four levels. They serve different purposes and I don't think AI has the same role to play in all of them.

Level 1: Transactional coaching

Helping someone deal with an immediate issue. It might be preparing for a difficult conversation, giving feedback or working out how to handle a problem with a team member. The focus is on what the manager needs to do now.

Level 2: Transitional coaching

Supporting someone through a change in role or circumstances. Becoming a manager for the first time, taking on a bigger team or managing through a restructure. It's about developing the confidence, skills and habits needed for that next stage.

Level 3: Transformative coaching

This goes deeper, challenging someone's beliefs, assumptions and behaviours. The aim is to change how someone thinks and leads, so the impact lasts long after the immediate problem has passed.

Level 4: Transcendental coaching

Going beyond the management role to explore the person themselves, their identity, purpose, values and what they want from their working life.

For me, the deeper levels still need the trust and skill of a human coach. But much of what managers need every day is transactional. They have a problem, they need to think it through and they need to act, often within hours rather than weeks.

That's where I see a real opportunity for AI, provided the right guardrails are in place. But a generic AI chatbot answering a management question is very different from an AI coach specifically designed to develop management behaviours that build capability.

A purpose-built coach should know what questions to ask, what context it needs, which behaviours to encourage and when to challenge the manager's thinking. It should also understand the individual manager, so the support reflects their strengths, development needs and the behaviours they're working on. And it should help managers work situations through for themselves.

I don't think we should underestimate the importance of those small, everyday moments. Handled well, they gradually build better management habits and can lead to deeper development over time. Handled badly, they reinforce poor ones, often without anyone realising.

Why the support managers get matters

Most of the day-to-day decisions managers make happen in a one-to-one, a quick message or a conversation between meetings, guided by whatever advice the manager picked up along the way.

That’s the glaring gap I keep coming back to. We invest a great deal in management training and leadership programmes, yet we rarely look at the advice managers lean on in the moments that count. More and more of that advice now comes from tools nobody in the organisation has chosen, checked or shaped.

I’m not suggesting we ban AI or ask HR to field every question. Managers will keep looking for help in the moment, and so they should. The opportunity is to make sure the help they find is grounded in good practice, encourages the right behaviours, asks good questions, understands the manager, is willing to challenge and knows its limits.

That’s why I built Vokser.

So where do your managers go when they need help? If you don’t know, book a Vokser demo and see the kind of support I’d want them to find.

Sources

• CMI and YouGov research on managers and why workers quit, reported by Fortune (2023)
• SHRM 2025 CHRO benchmarking
• Resume Builder survey of managers using AI, reported by Axios (2025)
• Stanford study on AI sycophancy in Science, reported by Fortune (2026)
• Gallup, managers account for 70% of variance in employee engagement