Whether a development effort changes how people actually work often comes down to one person who isn't taking it: each participant's own manager. When a manager knows what their team member is working on and asks about it, practice tends to happen. When the manager never hears about it, it usually doesn't — the manager is consistently one of the biggest factors in whether a new behaviour sticks back on the job.
In Knowly you don't have to leave that to chance. A learning journey can support the manager in parallel with the participant — manager activities and manager notifications that reach the manager at the same moments their team member is working, so their support lands when it counts.
If you'd rather start with the mechanics, see how to connect a manager to each participant and what managers see and receive in a learning journey. This article is about the harder part: designing that support so managers actually use it.
The three moves below turn "we asked the managers to be supportive" into support that happens.
Keep the manager in the loop, week by week
A manager who got a briefing at kickoff and nothing after has no idea what their team member is doing three weeks in. So loop them in continuously, not once. For each meaningful thing the participant does, give the manager a short parallel message: here's what your team member is working on this week, and here's your part in it.
In practice, that's a manager activity or manager notification paced to the participant's timeline. It doesn't ask the manager to learn anything — it keeps them oriented, so that when they do follow up, they know what they're following up on. That steady context is what gives a manager's later question somewhere to land.
How often those emails arrive depends on the journey type — in an individual learning journey each manager gets a stream timed to their own team member, while in a cohort journey scheduled manager emails arrive as one message per activity (the full breakdown of what managers receive and when). It's worth deciding how many manager messages a journey really needs, so their inbox stays useful rather than noisy.
Let the manager know the moment something happens
Week-level context only goes so far. The real coaching moment is right after the participant has done something specific — planned a feedback conversation, finished a reflection, committed to something they'll try on Thursday. That's when a manager's question matters most, and it's easy to miss if the manager only hears about the journey in general terms.
Knowly can email the manager the moment their team member submits an assignment or completes a micro training — one email per person, in both individual and cohort journeys — so the manager can react while it's fresh instead of a week later. Lean on that: build the moments you most want a manager to notice as an assignment or a micro training, so the email carries a real, specific thing their person just did.
Note. These per-person manager emails only go out if the notification is switched on for that activity. Check that it's turned on in the activity's notifications before you launch — otherwise the manager never hears about the moment you were counting on.
Give the manager a question to ask, not a task to do
Most managers want to help. What stops them is that "be supportive" is vague and their week is already full. So don't send homework. Make every manager message a job aid — something that makes a conversation they were already going to have go better.
The best manager notifications carry one concrete question the manager can drop straight into their next 1:1: "Your team member just planned a feedback conversation this week — ask how they want it to go." Five minutes of prep, not fifty. You write that question once, in the manager notification, and Knowly delivers it at the right moment.
Show the manager who it's about. A manager with several people in the journey often can't tell, at a glance, which of them an email concerns — and a note that could be about anyone is easy to skip. You can fix that: add the employee's name to the notification, or list the people it covers, so every manager email is instantly, obviously about a specific person. It's a small touch that does a lot of the work of making the support feel personal — especially in a cohort journey, where a single manager email can otherwise read as if it's about just one person when it's really about several.
The test for any manager message is simple: would a busy manager read it and think "thanks for that," or "another thing on my list"? Design for the first.
Lastly, keep in mind that manager support is a design choice, not a personality trait. You're not hoping managers care — you're giving the ones who already do a clear, timely, five-minute way to show it.