Managers are critical to a company’s success. They work with people on the front lines every day. That means they have, perhaps, the largest role in driving cultural alignment and employee engagement.
Unfortunately, in today’s workplace, most managers are created, not developed. That is, most managers become managers not because of their leadership and management skills, but because they’ve had proven success in their job. Therein lies the disconnect: managers account for 70% of the variance in employee engagement, but 45% of managers report they've never received formal management training, let alone training on engaging their people.
The promotion of strong individual employees into managerial roles needs to be more strategically managed within the business arena. HR and business leaders must prioritize the extent to which managers have the resources needed to create an employee experience that results in engagement, productivity and retention. How do we achieve this lofty outcome? Through the incorporation of a comprehensive manager support system and tool kit. Here are the key steps to building one.
1. Help managers understand the critical drivers of employee success.
How many times have you been in line for coffee and been overwhelmed by the options in front of you? The same goes for manager training. There are hundreds of thousands of books and theories on how to be a great leader. My advice? If we want to help managers succeed, we need to keep things simple.
A great leader becomes great by honing how they interact with their team — not by reading every management theory out there. Employee challenges are highly personalized and unique. That means we need to provide managers with tools that allow them to regularly interact with their teams and act quickly on feedback, especially when considering that 1 in 10 employees cite their manager as the top factor hindering their engagement. To succeed, managers need real-time, highly accessible input on how to support their people and how to effectively respond to individual employee engagement issues. This can come in the form of podcasts, technology-assisted input, online courses, etc. Prioritizing their immediate needs helps ensure that employees feel valued and supported as they progress to their highest potential.
2. Promote a culture rooted in performance feedback and recognition.
Managers must also help fulfill employees’ professional development goals, and that’s largely done via real-time performance feedback. To ensure ultimate success, however, managers also need to prioritize creating an environment that inspires their employees to succeed.
Positive reinforcement through frequent recognition is key to doing just that. Even though recognition is a basic inclusion in the management tool kit, it is simply not used enough. Gallup reports that only 30% of employees say they receive weekly recognition for a job well done.
To have a powerful impact on the engagement of their team members, HR leaders and employers need to give managers a reliable way to recognize employees regularly. This can be as simple as a “star of the week” email or as comprehensive as a formal companywide recognition program. Regardless of the approach, recognition needs to be owned by not only the manager, but by the company as a whole. When an organization ingrains recognition into its culture, everyone can partake in celebrating one another’s successes, leading to happier employees overall.
3. Equip managers to have tough engagement conversations.
One of the most impactful mechanisms a manager can employ is asking for and acknowledging feedback. All employees — and humans in general — want to be heard. However, managers often shy away from asking for engagement data or asking employees directly about their engagement. This is, in part, due to concern about the difficult conversations that might arise or based on a manager’s fear that they won’t know how to address an issue.
The reality is, no manager will be able to solve or answer every issue that presents itself. Yet, it is critically important to provide managers with their teams’ engagement data and empower them to start conversations. We need to coach managers to understand that not having immediate answers is OK, and then provide them with ways to respond to and address problems. It’s critical to give managers simple tools to make this exchange as productive as possible, such as simply acknowledging feedback and offering to look for an answer, up-leveling a situation to leadership, or asking the employee to be involved in coming up with a solution. These small steps can greatly improve the engagement of individual employees and the team as a whole.
Managers are a driving force in the workplace today, directly influencing an organization’s success by promoting a positive workplace culture and employee experience. For an organization to benefit from the potential impact managers provide, those managers must feel supported in order to support their employees in return.
As HR and business leaders, it is critical that we prioritize giving managers the coaching and ongoing support needed to have a positive and lasting impact on each of their people. In my experience, doing so will be repaid tenfold, with teams that are inspired and engaged to do their best work on behalf of the organization today and into the future.
