Managers are a hot topic. Just look at the following examples of article headlines from the past few months. (This one, and this one, to name a few)
While it’s great to see this topic garnering so much attention, it’s also important to dig beneath the surface to see what’s actually going on and to dive head first into the nuance and complexity within the space.
In addition to reading all of the articles and research, I get the chance to work with managers each and every day through my own leadership development practice.
This, combined with the handful of conversations I have each week with HR and talent leaders, I’ve compiled lots of information and insights of what I think is happening and going on within this broader topic of managers.
In this following article, I’m going to dissect and go deeper on some of the topics that tend to be bubbling up with respect to the topic of managers. If you’re working in this space, I would love to hear how this lands for you.
#1) Moving Beyond Manager Training and Thinking About the Systemic Impact of Managers
It’s really popular right now to talk about manager training and to talk about the importance of making sure managers have the right training to do their jobs. Here’s an example.
But simply throwing a manager training on is never going to be the answer if you’re trying to drive a meaningful business outcome. In my conversations with leadership and talent development professionals, many individuals and organizations are focused on moving beyond just manager training.
I wrote a piece about this to illustrate my point, but if you want to focus on the effectiveness of a manager, you need to think about the broader system you are a part of, and think about how to incorporate what you are trying to do in your training to the broader system. So yes, manager training, but even beyond that.
In many of my conversations with HR and talent leaders, many professionals are looking for ways to extend manager effectiveness beyond the core manager development offering. Yes, that training, and making sure managers are measured is still a priority that is being worked on, but many leaders outside of L&D now understand that the training is not enough. Having a “systemic” approach is what is required. This means, looking at manager development as a organization wide project. One that is threaded through many of the aspects of the talent lifecycle, not just in a program, or in a silo, and in broader HR and org-wide processes. So for example, incorporating manager development in things like
- Hiring
- DEI
- Employee Engagement
- Performance Management
- Company Rituals and Norms
- Etc etc etc
One example of this is how they are approaching manager behaviors at Adobe. They provide a really good example of how not focusing just on manager training leads to better manager effectiveness. So yes, manager training is still important, but manager training alone is not enough for delivering on a business outcome.
Article: It’s Not About Manager Training (But We Should Still Do It)
#2) The Reasons Why Managers Fail
Since we all have managers, many of us have ideas about where managers fall short. Gartner decided to do some research on this, and found some surprising results as some of the top reasons (based on their manager effectiveness data) as to why managers fail. Reasons include: Lack of self-awareness, one-sided empathy, unproductive employee relationships, and lack of alignment with employee goals.
Article: 4 Reasons Why Managers Fail (HBR)
#3) Middle Management is Tough
In a lot of articles and pieces, many people throw around the manager term like it’s all one and the same. And to be sure, there are a lot of similarities. But when you dig beneath the surface, there’s also some nuance. Case in point: middle managers. Middle managers are often in a really tough spot. Not only do they have a tough job (managing up, down, and across) but many are feeling the brunt of burnout as a result of being in this tough spot.
Article: How HR Can Help Middle Managers
#4) The Role of The Manager in Employee Career Development
As more and more companies look to strengthen their career development practices inside their organization, an often overlooked topic is the role of the manager in employee career development. Many employees choose to work at a company for career development opportunities, and many employees also choose to leave a job for a new one for the exact same reason. While companies must put in a strategy for their career development programs, the manager is often the person who is supposed to help and co-facilitate this. Unfortunately, many managers are never given the right tools, training or support to do this effectively. For the past few years, I’ve been studying this topic, and have some ideas and suggestions for how people managers can take the right actions to support employee career development.
Article: How People Managers can Help Employees With Their Career Development
#5) Managers Have Large Spans of Control
One challenge that many managers face is the size of their span of control. In an ideal world, managers would have the right amount of direct reports that enables their team to achieve its objectives, but due to many reasons (too much work, performance management, organizational politics, etc) many managers have large amounts of direct reports which can make it unsustainable or put their team in a difficult positive to be effective. This has all sorts of downstream implications. In their research on manager effectiveness, Culture Amp found that the number of employees calling their manager “stressed” doubles if a manager has 9+ direct reports.
When managers don’t have enough time to manage their reports, or if they have too much on their plate, this is what leads to burnout, and/or, employee disengagement. In some respects, the solutions are pretty simple – rightsize the headcount per manager, and right size the workload amount. But in many organizations, both of those things are very difficult to do.
Article: Using ONA To Find Your Optimal Team Size
#6) Should Managers Be Coaches?
Coaching as a skill and behavior has become popular inside organizations, especially for managers. And in many ways, that is a good thing. Forrester’s research shows that employees who feel like they have a coaching manager are eight times more likely to be highly engaged. While this is a good thing, should we then make all managers become “coaches?” (noun, versus verb) According to Betsy Summers (Forrester, Analyst) not so fast. While it’s true that coaching can be effective, Summers observes that A) there are coaching isn’t always properly defined or taught and B) The manager-employee relationship isn’t always designed for a manager to truly be a “coach,” mostly due to the power dynamic that exists.
Betsy hits the nail on a broader trend: a skill, behavior, topic etc becomes very popular and organizations rush to adopt and scale it throughout the organization. While some of this can work in some organizations, it must be done so in an intentional way.
Article: Can your managers be good coaches?
#7) AI and Middle Managers
Middle managers have taken a hit over the past few years. A popular target amongst layoffs and cuts leads to a broader question: What is the role of the middle manager, and how might it be impacted by AI and technology in the future? Armed with the help of AI, Julia, Dhar, Managing Director of the BCG Behavioral Science Lab and her colleagues take a stab at identifying the role of the middle manager (in the future) and how middle managers might work hand in hand with AI in this new role
Podcast: The End of Middle Management (For Real)
#8) Great Managers Are Facilitators of Connection
Part of a manager’s job is to figure out how to get the team to contribute to achieving a shared goal or objective. While some of that will inevitably be on the specific performance of the individual, one area that great managers seem to get right is finding ways to help an employee develop the connections they need to feel engaged in their work, be connected to the team/org, and be productive in achieving their objectives. Managers can do this by A) providing focused attention and support to an individual employee by checking in, seeing how their employees are doing and genuinely caring but also by B) connecting their employees to other people and helping the employee build their own social capital. Worklytics, an ONA software company found that based on their data, there was correlation between A) lower levels of disengagement and B) more time spent with their manager.
Article: Manager Effectiveness: It’s Time For A New Playbook