In Defence of the Manager...

We've all seen the headlines about managers...

"Bad Managers are the reason why people leave their jobs"

"Bad Managers create toxic workplaces"

"Bad Managers cause Employee Burnout"

I'm sure if I look hard enough I'll find some research showing a bad manager caused my premature baldness... (that might actually be true).

I'm not saying all managers are great, or that the research is inaccurate. But I think the courtroom of public opinion is not in their favour. The statistic I see most often is that the number one reason people leave their jobs is their manager. But is that fair? And is it dangerous to assume that's the case without looking a little deeper?

Managers take on a lot of responsibility, and many fingers in the company end up pointing at them for one reason or another:

• Numbers in the team not high enough? What's the manager doing to solve the problem
• Employee Engagement levels too low? What's the manager doing to improve this
• Average employee tenure too high? Why isn't the manager moving people on
• Employee attrition too high? What is the manager doing that's making people leave...

I could go on.

So whilst every headline is click-baiting us into a world where the easy blame is levelled at the managers, let me make the case for the defence.

Evidence for the Defence 1: Managers are not in a happy place.

Management comes with responsibility over others and seniority within the company, both of which usually come after some experience.?On average, we enter management roles for the first time in our mid-late 30's.One of the major pieces of research into Unhappiness and Age showed that on average, humans experience happiness in their life in a U-shape graph.?Our childhood to early 20's is good, as is the period from early 50's until the end of our life.?Sandwiched in between is a drop in happiness which peaks in the late 40's (your author is 42 and not delighted by this prospect…).?

Why are we less happy in this 30-50 period??There are several main causes:

1. People might have young families at this point, which increases stress levels at home as well as reducing our opportunities to refresh (sleep/exercise/eating healthily)
2. Our social circles change (friends have less free time to invest together, opportunities to make new friends are harder)
3. Our parents are at the latter stages of their lives?

So the point at which people become managers is typically the point in their lives when they're experiencing the most consistently low levels of happiness.

Evidence for the Defence 2: I give you the "Rock" and the "Hard Place"

The Rock:

In a post pandemic world, employees increasingly expect flexibility over when and where they work. We've seen volatile global shifts in the labour market, with the tech sector a prime example. The war on talent in 2022 led to huge hiring increases, and just 12 months on, most major tech companies are announcing waves of redundancies.

During this period, companies invested in publicly promoting their culture as a way to attract the best talent. With that publicity comes expectation, both from the new and existing employees. The "Rock" forms when a company exudes an amazing culture externally (website/socials)... but the lived experience as an employee is actually very different (this is more apparent in tough economic times - I drew a little picture of this recently to illustrate this point).

Managers are the ones that feel that variance the most. They are the front line to the employees who expect the amazing culture they've been sold, but without exec level investment in delivering the promise of this amazing culture across the company, it falls to the manager to try and bridge the gap.

The Hard Place:

Whilst the managers battle to provide the cultural experience that their employees have been promised, the leadership above them will be focussed on performance and results. Exec Leadership teams can cause havoc in a business if they don't understand their ripple effect. A phrase I learned early on in my management career was the term "?? Umbrella" (this is a family friendly show but I'm sure you're familiar with the term).

It literally means that you shield your direct reports from the ?? from above. Shelter them from the unnecessary noise caused by a panicking leadership team when the numbers aren't right, protect their focus from distractions caused by leadership teams trying to control things in order to project confidence in their part of the business (Bridge Plan anyone?), translate the messages from above into something less horrible and maybe vaguely motivating before they hit your team...

This is the reality for a lot of managers.

Evidence for the Defence 3: Management is not a reward for tenure/individual performance.

In the sales profession, the top-performing salesperson is often rewarded for their consistent performance with a promotion to a management role. Think about this for a second.... most sales people spend their career being rewarded for individual performance, and are often ranked against their colleagues for motivation. They are held primarily accountable for customer performance. These aren't the best conditions from which to find people that will prioritise the performance of their collective team over their own.

When someone moves from an individual contributor to manager, how much training are they given on how to be successful in this role? How do they know how to change their mindset from "I must perform at my best" to "I need to help my team to perform at their best". I wonder how different the recruitment is when companies hire manager externally vs promoting people into first time management roles internally...

My point being, are managers set up to fail from the start?

Ladies and Gentleman of the Jury, the Defence rests...

So the next time you see some click-bait, anti manager headlines, just pause and wonder at the context behind it...

And if you're a CEO/member of the exec team and you want to create an amazing environment for your managers to succeed, give me a call ?

#CultureHack

This weeks #culturehack I'm calling "Talent Mining" and is one of my absolute favourites!

Everyone in your team will have hidden talents and skills, but often these aren't visible or apparent to others (especially in remote/hybrid settings). This is a workshop you can run with your team to learn from each other and have some fun doing it!

Step 1. You need a facilitator. It can be the Team Manager, someone in the team or someone external.

Step 2. The Facilitator explains the session and provides their example to illustrate (mine would be that I'm really good at presenting, for example, for someone else it could be editing, for someone else it could be calendar management etc...)

Step 3. Everyone spends a couple of minutes thinking about the talent they want to share and writes it down (one per person).

Step 4. The Facilitator then asks each person in turn to talk about their talent, asking questions like:

• "Breakdown your approach for us"
• "If things go wrong, what do you do?"
• "What advice would you give to someone else that wants to become good at this"

That's it! It's a lovely activity that will open up opportunities for people to shine, to share something their proud of being good at, and to build relationships within the team.

Have fun and please let me know if you try it!