Nobody likes it when the checkerboard is thrown up into the air mid-game. The pandemic completely upended how work is done, and everyone is still waiting to see how the game pieces fall back down onto the board.
However, disruption allows for a reset. One area ripe for such a reset is how we develop our managers. To understand why this reset is needed, just look at these two well-known data points from Gallup:
- Decades of research has found at least two-thirds of employees are disengaged.
- More than 70 percent of the variance in employee engagement is driven by managers.
Our current manager development efforts just aren’t cutting it. The hard truth is that organizations are failing to develop managers with the ability to engage and retain people.
A reset is needed, and the timing couldn’t be better. Work has changed. Managing at arm’s length is different than in a 9-to-5 office job. And we’re seeing alarming rates of burnout in our manager population.
The war for talent isn’t going away. The only sustainable approach an organization has to shield itself from regrettable attrition is simply this: They need to have managers that people want to work for. This requires a different approach to developing managers.
Here are five ways you can reset your company’s manager development efforts and create engaging managers who people want to work for.
Strike balance with a Goldilocks leadership model
If someone asked you to recite your organization’s leadership model, would you be able to do it from memory alone?
If you can’t, you’ve got plenty of company. Research from the NeuroLeadership Institute provides stark illumination on this point:
- Only 17 percent of leadership models were “definitely easy” to remember.
- 44 percent of models have 21-plus behaviors.
The uncomfortable truth is our leadership models are unwieldy, requiring people to be superheroes to check all the boxes.
A leadership model should not try to cover everything. Rather, the two goals of a model should be helping our managers focus on what is most critical in doing their job and measuring success in their role. Just like Goldilocks, we must strike a balance in the number of behaviors included in our leadership model — not too few, not too many, but just right.
What is the right number? The sweet spot is three to five behaviors. More than that, and you’re trying to bundle too much into the role, creating a model that is both unrealistic to achieve and hard to remember.
The last data point the NeuroLeadership Institute shares on this topic is also instructive: Only 27 percent of models were “definitely meaningful” for the everyday job of leaders. In addition to being easy to remember and realistic, leadership models also need to be meaningful and focused.
Focus on a manager’s ability to impact their people
If you had to summarize in one sentence the objective of your manager development program, what would you say? A surprising number of answers sound something like, “we needed manager development.” Without a clearly defined objective, companies are highly vulnerable to adopting whatever leadership fad is getting the most attention. Instead, we need to have a strategy that helps make principled decisions about what’s in and what’s out.
Manager development efforts can fall into one of two categories:
- Increasing the performance of the individual manager.
- Increasing the manager’s ability to impact their team’s performance.
What is the right mix between the two? Google’s study to identify the behaviors of successful managers — Project Oxygen — helps to answer this question.
Google found the most successful managers exhibited the following 10 behaviors:
- Has a clear vision and strategy for the team.
- Empowers team and does not micromanage.
- Creates an inclusive team environment, showing concern for success and well-being.
- Is a good coach.
- Supports career development and discusses performance.
- Has key technical skills to help advise the team.
- Is a good communicator — listens and shares information.
- Collaborates across the company.
- Is productive and results-oriented.
- Is a strong decision maker.
The first six behaviors on this list clearly fall in the category of a manager’s ability to impact their team. And while the remaining four behaviors can also help a manager impact their team’s performance, they’re instrumental to a manager’s individual performance.
The conclusion? At least two-thirds of manager development should focus on the manager’s ability to impact a team.
And yet so many existing programs are upside down, focusing more on developing the skills to impact the managers themselves. Why? Perhaps it stems from the belief that managers need to know everything to be effective in their role. It’s an outdated belief, which the TV show “Ted Lasso” — an American football coach hired to manage a British soccer team — brilliantly illustrates. To shift the focus of manager development programs to the manager’s ability to impact a team, we need to talk about motivation.
Prioritize the science of motivation
The pandemic sparked a profound psychological shift in how people think about work. Gartner found 65 percent of employees said the pandemic had made them rethink the place that work should have in their life. A study by McKinsey looking at what is driving people to leave their job highlighted the importance of relational factors, including the potential for advancement, a flexible work environment and a sense of belonging.
In short, the employer-employee relationship based primarily on transactional terms is over. People want a more mutual and meaningful relationship with work. And we can develop this kind of relationship by tapping into people’s intrinsic motivators.
A quick primer on the two major theories behind the science of motivation:
Incentive theory suggests people are motivated by extrinsic factors such as rewards and punishments. This motivator is important, but only to a point. Think of it as table stakes: People need to feel like they’re being treated fairly. However, a sole focus on this motivator reinforces a transactional relationship between the employer and employee. As we know, it is easy for a competitor to offer similar (or slightly better) compensation to lure people away.
Self-determination theory suggests people are motivated by intrinsic needs. Needs like the flexibility to make choices, the opportunity to develop in areas they care about and connection to purpose and people. When these intrinsic motivators are tapped, the happiness and well-being of the individual spikes. It creates a more mutual relationship between a person and their job and employer, a relationship that is much harder for people to walk away from.
This spike in happiness and well-being brings rich dividends to the organization as well. Gartner found that when employees have some choice over where, when, and how much they work, the percentage of high performers jumps from 36 percent of employees to 55 percent. And organizations that create a shared sense of purpose see the percentage of highly engaged employees leap from 40 percent to 60 percent.
Managers are the only one-to-one touchpoint an organization has with their employees. The only way an organization will successfully create this deeper connection between employees and their work is through managers. Managers need to have a clear understanding of the importance of intrinsic motivators and know how to tap into these internal drives. However, a survey of learning and development leaders found only 43 percent of manager development programs included intrinsic motivators as a major focus.
Use the 40-20-40 rule to drive transformation
Now that we know what to focus manager development programs on, let’s explore how to make sure the experience sticks so we don’t waste our finite L&D budget and resources.
First, it’s important to understand the distinction between training and transformation:
Training is an activity. Transformation is an objective.
Do not conflate the two — training is a part of transformation, but on its own it is not transformation. Many programs fail because they expect training and training alone to cause transformation. To drive the transformative behavior changes we seek in our managers, we have to structure development efforts to support managers before and after the training so that it sticks.
Robert Brinkerhoff and Anne Apking’s book, “High Impact Learning,” which explores why development programs fail, emphasizes this point. They found 40 percent of the time failure was due to insufficient upfront engagement before the training session, and 40 percent of the time was due to poor sustainment activities after the training. The remaining 20 percent of failure was from the training event itself, caused by either the wrong content or wrong trainer.
The 40-20-40 rule illustrates the importance of thinking about not only what happens during the training event, but also what happens before and after:
- Before: Make it clear to participants why they were selected and why they should care, as well as provide the appropriate preparation to prime them for learning.
- After: Provide reinforcement, tools, and coaching so that managers have the support they need to translate their new knowledge into application on the job.
It is foundational to get the training curriculum right, but transformation depends on spending far more time thinking and planning for what happens before and after the learning experience.
That brings us to our last finding: manager development should not be just about transformation driven by the curriculum itself.
Make networking a feature, not an afterthought
Amy Speranza, global learning leader of GE’s Career Accelerator Program, found herself strategizing how to deliver leadership development virtually at the start of the pandemic. One thing stood out in the feedback from alumni of the career accelerator program: The networking component consistently scored first or second when it came to the most valuable component of the program. Her conversations with internal business leaders echoed this sentiment, leading her team to focus on curriculum, external thought leaders, and networking as the three priorities when redeveloping their program.
To hit the reset on manager development efforts, we have to broaden the definition of success. It’s not only about the successful learning and application of the right curriculum, but also about building more connections among the managers themselves to allow real chances for participants to create human bonds.
“This is more than just about having cocktails,” Speranza warns. “Devote time in your curriculum for networking opportunities in very structured ways. Create events designed to facilitate engagement between businesses and functions. That means going beyond just having extra-long breaks or scheduling happy hours and dinners.”
Building in several opportunities for structured ways to network has many benefits: It gives the participants what they want. It taps into the intrinsic motivator of purpose, helping people connect more with the larger manager community within the company. It helps to reduce the siloed mentality between business units and functions that organizational inertia inevitably creates. And it creates a community of people who can help coach and support each other after the learning experience, making the session more valuable and impactful.
As we fundamentally rethink the employee value proposition based on the shifts in how people are approaching work, there has never been a more exciting time to be in L&D. These five findings can help to ensure your organization develops managers equipped to engage and retain the people you need to thrive in the new work environment.
