Managers do their best work in a learning journey when something prompts them at the right moment — to understand their role, prepare a conversation, follow along, or act on what a participant just did. You build those prompts as activities aimed at managers, using the same activity types you already use for participants.
How to aim an activity at managers
Every activity has an Audience setting: Participants or Managers (or whatever you've renamed the manager role to under Settings → Nomenclature). Set it to Managers and the activity goes to them instead of the participants.
In the journey timeline, manager activities sit in their own part of the timeline — add an activity there, or open an existing activity and switch its Audience to Managers. You can change the audience right up until the activity has been sent. Manager activities are delivered by email.
What you can build for managers
Micro training — a short, multi-slide briefing: how to coach, what to ask in a one-to-one, how to support this particular journey.
Instruction — aimed at a manager, an instruction goes out as a direct message. Good for guidance or a timely nudge that needs no action back.
Assignment — ask a manager to do something and submit or confirm it, like "have a feedback conversation and note how it went". An assignment is the one activity type where you can require an approval.
Evaluation and quiz can also be aimed at managers when you want to gather their input or check their understanding.
Because one manager can have several employees, manager notifications can name the employees each one is about — see Show managers which employee a notification is about.
One manager activity, however many employees
A manager gets a single copy of each manager activity, no matter how many employees they follow — and this holds in individual learning journeys just as much as in cohort ones. So if you build a manager checklist as a Micro training, the manager sees one checklist for the journey, not a separate one for each new hire.
What does repeat per employee is the reminders: the manager gets one notification per connected employee, so they're prompted for each person even though the activity itself is shared. That difference trips people up on individual onboarding journeys — the emails arrive per new hire, but the activity a manager opens is the same one each time.
If you genuinely need something a manager fills in separately for each employee — a checklist they complete per new hire, say — a manager activity inside the journey won't do that on its own. A common way to handle it is to attach the checklist as a file in the manager's notification, so they get one per employee to keep track of outside the shared activity.
What you can't aim at managers
Group meetings and in-person or virtual sessions are built for participants — you can't set their audience to managers. If you want the managers themselves to meet, build that as a separate learning journey designed for managers, rather than as a manager activity inside this one.
The manager registration form is separate
The Manager registration form isn't a manager activity — it's an activity your participants complete to register who their manager is, so it lives in the participant part of the journey. See Manager registration form.
Preview before you launch
Preview a manager activity as a manager and send yourself a test before publishing. That's the surest way to catch unclear instructions and confirm the activity reads for the manager audience, not the participants. See The manager's experience in Knowly.