The manager moment: Why great managers are now urgent
4-minute read
Companies increasingly rely on managers to catalyze employee results and engagement. At the same time, being a manager is getting harder. In the midst of societal and economic tensions, today’s managers lead teams that are more diverse, distributed, and demanding than ever before. The result of this strain is employee underperformance and attrition, along with manager burnout. It’s already a problem, and it’s only getting worse. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Why Managers Matter
Managers are a uniquely powerful “system” to enable high performance and resilience. When executed well, the manager role functions like a lever — a small input that yields massive output.
What is it about the manager role that makes it so well-poised for impact? Only managers are able to address the unique needs of individual employees. They offer a personalized approach that a company as a whole cannot — especially at scale. Imagine a group of Olympic athletes training to win. Sure, they can all watch the same instructional videos, but nothing can compare to the impact of one-on-one and team-level support. The result of this model is that managers have a disproportionate impact on performance, engagement, inclusion, and culture.
Managers also serve as a communication hub for the organization — tailoring broad org-wide messages to their teams and sharing team-level insights with company leadership. This ‘hub effect’ is a must-have at a time when companies must stay nimble to survive.
The Urgent Problem
At LifeLabs Learning, we’ve studied and taught more than 400,000 managers at over 2,000 of the world’s leading-edge companies (like Slack, Glossier, Lyft, Venmo, and BlackRock). Leaders at nearly every company we’ve served believe that managers matter, but few believe that their managers are highly effective. According to Wigert and Harter (2017), bad management costs roughly $7 trillion globally every year. And only 20% of employees strongly agree that their manager motivates them.
What’s more, managers themselves are feeling the weight of their growing tactical and emotional responsibilities. Since 2020, our clients have cited burnout as one of the biggest threats for managers and the companies that rely on them. We’ve seen a renewed concern about manager burnout since April of 2022. What is causing this widespread crisis in management? We believe that the root of the problem lies in the fact that companies aren’t sure how to equip their managers to succeed. Most critically: they don’t know what skills matter most for their managers and how to help managers build those skills quickly.
The Revolutionary Opportunity
Despite the fact that managers all around the world are in trouble, we have seen first-hand that small changes make a big impact, fast. The return on investment in managers is significant.
Companies that take a strategic approach to building their managers’ capacity to do great work see the payoff in performance and engagement and play a vital role in creating the future of work. Put simply, it should not be the norm that managers are exhausted by their work and that employees dread working with their manager. Today, more people than ever have the unprecedented opportunity to unlock the full potential of their talents and passions through their work. Managers can be the obstacle to this workplace revolution – or the catalysts.
What You Can Do Right Away
Just because the problem of struggling managers took a long time to develop, it doesn’t have to mean that it will take a long time to solve. To make immediate progress in the effectiveness of your company’s managers:
Acknowledge the individuals: Tell your managers you recognize their roles are tough and also vital to your company. Thank them for their care and perseverance.
Clarify the role:
For a quick boost of alignment, remind your managers that the purpose of their role is to be multipliers: they expand the capacity of each person on their team to increase the organization’s overall capacity to achieve results and stay agile.
Next, carve out time to achieve greater clarity each month: create or clarify their job description, success metrics, and a small number of manager standards.
Amplify their effectiveness: To avoid overwhelm, offer a small number of high-quality resources in areas most important to their role. When in doubt, fortify the core skills managers need in their role.
Be sure to engage your managers in your quest to make them more effective while making their lives easier. Ask for feedback and input along the way. Nearly every manager we’ve ever met wants to succeed -- they just need a little help getting there.
To help your managers become effective faster, contact LifeLabs Learning!
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