STAKEHOLDER INTERVIEW GUIDE

Manager Capability Programme


Purpose: Understand the business context, current management capability, employee experience and barriers to effective people management. 

Project stage: 1.1 — Understand 

L&D process: Capability Development Cycle 

Status: Hypothetical portfolio example 

1. PURPOSE OF THE INTERVIEWS

The purpose of stakeholder interviews is to build a shared understanding of the management capability challenge before defining the learning solution. 

The interviews explore: 

  • the business need 

  • current management behaviours 

  • employee experience 

  • capability gaps 

  • barriers to application 

  • existing organisational support 

  • desired future behaviours 

The information gathered would contribute to the Learning Needs Analysis and subsequent Capability Framework. 

Principle: A request for "manager training" is a starting point for investigation, not a diagnosis. 

2. STAKEHOLDER GROUPS

The discovery process would involve five stakeholder groups. 

  1. Senior Leaders

    Strategic and business perspective 
    Business priorities, expectations and performance challenges 

  2. HR Business Partners

    People and organisational perspective 
    Recurring management issues, patterns and existing interventions 

  3. Managers

    Practitioner perspective 
    Current capability, challenges, confidence and barriers 

  4. Employees

    Learner/customer perspective 
    Experience of management and desired behaviours 

  5. People Analytics / HR

    Evidence perspective 
    Relevant people and performance data 

The questions would be adapted to each stakeholder group rather than using one generic interview script. 

3. SENIOR LEADER INTERVIEW

Objective

Understand why manager capability matters to the organisation and what successful management should look like from a business perspective. 

Business context

  1. What are the main business priorities currently affecting your teams? 

  2. Where does management capability have the greatest impact on those priorities? 

  3. What management challenges are currently affecting performance? 

  4. What would you most like managers to do differently? 

Expectations

  1. What does effective people management look like in this organisation? 

  2. What behaviours distinguish your strongest managers? 

  3. Where is there currently inconsistency between managers or teams? 

  4. What leadership behaviours will become increasingly important in the future? 

Performance

  1. Where are you seeing the greatest performance challenges? 

  2. Are there recurring issues that you believe stronger management capability could influence? 

  3. What would improve if managers became more effective? 

Success

  1. If this programme were successful six months from now, what would you expect to see differently? 

  2. What evidence would convince you that the programme had made a difference? 

  3. Which organisational outcomes would matter most? 

Closing question

  1. If you could change one management behaviour across the organisation, what would it be?

4. HR BUSINESS PARTNER INTERVIEW

Objective

Understand recurring people-management issues, organisational context and existing HR interventions. 

Current challenges

  1. What management issues do you see most frequently? 

  2. Which issues are repeated across teams? 

  3. Where do managers appear least confident? 

  4. What types of situations are most frequently escalated to HR? 

Performance management

  1. How effectively are managers currently addressing performance issues? 

  2. Are issues typically addressed early or after they have escalated? 

  3. What patterns do you see in performance-management cases? 

People development

  1. How consistently are managers supporting employee development? 

  2. Are development and career conversations happening regularly? 

  3. What barriers prevent managers from developing their people? 

Organisational context

  1. What existing management processes, tools or learning resources are available? 

  2. What has already been tried? 

  3. What has worked? 

  4. What has not worked? 

  5. Are there organisational processes or expectations that managers currently find difficult to navigate? 

Partnership

  1. What would you need from L&D for this programme to be successful? 

  2. How could HRBPs reinforce the capability after the learning intervention? 

Closing question

  1. What do you think is the biggest gap between what managers are expected to do and what they currently do?

5. MANAGER INTERVIEW

Objective

Understand managers' lived experience of leading people, including capability, confidence and barriers to application. 

Current role

  1. What are the most challenging parts of your role as a manager? 

  2. Which people-management responsibilities take the most time? 

  3. Which management situations do you feel most confident handling? 

Feedback

  1. How comfortable are you giving constructive feedback? 

  2. What makes feedback conversations difficult? 

  3. How often do you give feedback outside formal performance processes? 

  4. What tends to happen when an employee reacts negatively to feedback? 

Coaching and development

  1. How do you currently support employee development? 

  2. How comfortable are you having career or development conversations? 

  3. When an employee comes to you with a problem, how do you typically respond? 

Performance

  1. How confident are you addressing underperformance? 

  2. What makes difficult performance conversations challenging? 

  3. How early do you typically address performance concerns? 

Accountability

  1. How do you set expectations with your team? 

  2. How do you follow up on agreed actions? 

  3. What makes it difficult to maintain accountability? 

Barriers

  1. What prevents you from managing people as effectively as you would like? 

  2. Are there processes, systems or organisational expectations that make management more difficult? 

  3. What support would make the biggest difference? 

Learning preferences

  1. What type of development would be most useful to you? 

  2. What opportunities do you currently have to practise management skills? 

  3. What would make a management programme genuinely useful rather than something you simply have to attend? 

Closing question

  1. What is one people-management situation you would most like to feel more confident handling?

6. EMPLOYEE INTERVIEW

Objective

Understand management capability from the employee perspective and identify the behaviours that most influence employee experience and performance. 

Management experience

  1. What does good management look like from your perspective? 

  2. What do you value most from your manager? 

  3. How clear are you about what is expected of you? 

  4. How consistent is your management experience? 

Feedback

  1. How often do you receive useful feedback? 

  2. What makes feedback from a manager helpful? 

  3. Do you receive feedback early enough to act on it? 

Development

  1. How well does your manager support your development? 

  2. How often do you discuss your development or career? 

  3. Do you feel your manager understands your strengths and development needs? 

Performance and accountability

How clearly does your manager communicate expectations? 

How effectively are performance issues addressed? 

Do managers follow through on commitments and agreed actions? 

  1. Relationship and support

  2. How comfortable do you feel raising challenges with your manager? 

  3. Do you feel listened to when you raise concerns? 

  4. What could your manager do differently to support your performance? 

Closing question

  1. If your manager changed one behaviour that would make the biggest difference to your experience at work, what would it be?

7. PEOPLE ANALYTICS / HR DATA DISCOVERY

Objective

Identify quantitative evidence that can complement stakeholder perspectives. 

This is not a traditional interview but a structured data-discovery conversation with the relevant HR or People Analytics stakeholder. 

Data availability

  1. What people and performance data is currently available? 

  2. Which indicators are already tracked at manager, team or organisational level? 

  3. What historical data is available for comparison? 

Potential indicators

Explore the availability and relevance of: 

  • employee engagement 

  • manager effectiveness 

  • retention 

  • regretted attrition 

  • internal progression 

  • absence 

  • employee relations cases 

  • performance-management activity 

  • development-plan completion 

  • employee survey results 

  • 1:1 or development conversation indicators 

Data quality

  1. How reliable and consistent is the available data? 

  2. Can data be segmented by team, manager population or business area? 

  3. Are there known limitations or contextual factors? 

Evaluation

  1. Which indicators could provide a meaningful baseline? 

  2. Which indicators could be revisited after the intervention? 

  3. What would constitute meaningful movement? 

Closing question

  1. Which available data would give us the strongest evidence about the current state of management capability?

8. CROSS-STAKEHOLDER QUESTIONS

Some questions should be deliberately repeated across stakeholder groups. 

This allows L&D to identify areas of alignment and discrepancy. 

Example

Senior leader:

"Managers need to address performance issues earlier." 

Manager:

"I want to address issues earlier, but I'm not always clear about the process." 

Employee:

"Performance issues often seem to be addressed only after they have become serious." 

This creates a more useful diagnosis than relying on any one perspective. 

9. DISCOVERY THEMES

Interview findings would be organised around five themes. 

01 — Business need

What organisational outcomes are affected? 

02 — Current behaviour

What are managers doing today? 

03 — Desired behaviour

What should managers do differently? 

04 — Capability gap

What knowledge, skills or confidence are missing? 

05 — Environmental barriers

What organisational conditions prevent application? 

These themes provide the bridge into the Learning Needs Analysis. 

10. INTERVIEW SUMMARY TEMPLATE

Following the discovery conversations, findings would be consolidated rather than reported as isolated interview notes. 


  • Feedback 

  • Feedback is often delayed 

  • Managers + employees 

  • Develop feedback capability 

  • Coaching 

  • Managers often provide solutions 

  • Managers 

  • Develop coaching skills 

  • Performance 

  • Difficult conversations are delayed 

  • HRBPs + employees 

  • Develop performance conversation capability 

  • Development 

  • Development is inconsistent 

  • Employees + HRBPs 

  • Strengthen development practice 

  • Expectations 

  • Expectations are not always explicit 

  • Employees + leaders 

  • Develop expectation-setting 

  • Environment 

  • Processes can create uncertainty 

  • Managers + HRBPs 

  • Review tools and organisational support 

11. FROM DISCOVERY TO DIAGNOSIS

The stakeholder discovery process feeds directly into the next stage of the Capability Development Cycle. 


The purpose of the interviews is therefore not simply to collect opinions. 

It is to generate enough evidence to make a reasoned L&D diagnosis. 

12. L&D PRINCIPLE

Start with the problem, not the programme.

Effective L&D partnership requires understanding the business context, listening to different stakeholders and identifying the actual capability gap before deciding what learning intervention is appropriate. 

A request for training may ultimately result in: 

  • learning 

  • practice 

  • coaching 

  • tools 

  • process changes 

  • leadership reinforcement 

  • …or a combination of interventions. 

The role of L&D is to determine what will best enable the required capability and performance, rather than automatically turning every problem into a course. 

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