Manager standards: The secret to accelerating manager excellence
3-minute read
Most companies don’t have the luxury of waiting around for their managers to become reliable drivers of company performance. Managers are both more urgently needed than ever before and find it harder to do their jobs than ever before.
At LifeLabs Learning, our job is to accelerate manager and organizational effectiveness while making managers’ lives easier. While we focus on rapid upskilling, we’ve noticed that, alongside skills, managers are craving greater role clarity.
In addition to simply articulating the purpose of the manager role, we’ve found that companies with the strongest managers go one step further. They set a small number of behavioral ‘standards’ that all managers, including executives, commit to upholding.
These standards transform broad accountabilities like “enable learning and development” to specific, observable behaviors, like holding weekly one-on-ones with each person on the team. They serve to standardize quality across the organization and ritualize the most important drivers of employee success and engagement.
How to make your manager standards work for you
Pick observable behaviors. Managers and teams shouldn’t have to guess whether they are sticking to the standard. A binary behavior like “have a career planning conversation on a quarterly basis” works best. Avoid blur words like “inspire” and “empower.”
Limit your standards to 10 max. Any more is hard to remember and track.
Incorporate your core values. Show your managers how values look in action by linking them up to your manager standards
Embed manager standards in onboarding. Make sure new managers and individual contributors see the standards early. Post them where they are easily accessible like a company wiki or intranet. Add them or link them to your manager job description along with manager success metrics.
Build a self-reinforcing system. Create consistency by referencing these standards in training, surveys, feedback, promotions, hiring, self-assessments, and manager 180s. Build nudges for each behavior into your company workflows (e.g., 1-on-1 agenda templates, monthly announcements, quarterly surveys).
Questions to guide you and your team in setting helpful standards
What specifically do our best managers do on a regular basis?
What manager actions do we see as non-negotiable?
What concrete behaviors bring our company values to life?
What manager routines or habits can nudge important conversations?
Sample manager standards (based on LifeLabs Learning research)
How to earn internal support for manager standards
We’ve seen some of our clients hesitate when it comes to articulating manager standards. They fear that spelling out concrete actions is overly prescriptive. While it’s true that micromanaging managers rarely works well, we’ve found again and again that a small number of specific behavioral standards provide just the right combination of guidance and autonomy. Managers who have clear standards of behavior are more confident, calm, and effective. And not only do these manager standards reduce performance gaps across teams, they also allow inexperienced managers to rapidly accelerate up the learning curve.
To earn internal support for this initiative, gather feedback from your managers on what they like about the idea of agreeing to a small number of set standards and what, if anything, concerns them. Integrate their input into your plan.
Interview your managers to learn which of their habits have served them most and share quotes from them about why these behaviors are so important.
Rather than positioning these standards as rules, talk about them as small cornerstone habits that make a big impact while making managers’ lives easier. Use pilots, nurses, and doctors as analogous professions that all lean on the power of disciplined, ritualized practices to achieve great results. And if you still face any resistance, start with a test period or test department.
Expectation clarity + skill capacity = managers who drive unstoppable organizational success!
To rapidly skill up your managers, contact LifeLabs Learning.
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