Improve your Managers, Drive Operational Excellence

The problems we help businesses with are always different, but one thing that always helps is to zoom out from focusing on the symptoms to see the wider context of what’s really going on.

A good illustration of this is when an organization is dealing with high turnover. It’s an issue with a lot of different potential causes, and it disrupts everything – team dynamics, workflow, project continuity, and of course, it’s expensive.

There are two issues going on here.

Firstly, everything exists in context, and excessive turnover is no different. When you look at the wider picture, you see the different parts that are connected, and you can understand the whole. You might start to see other gaps that affect not just retention, but performance and quality overall. This includes (but is not limited to) team culture, the mental wellbeing of the team, and star performers burning out. It may well be that you’re losing people who have a bright future and retaining people who have a great past. We see lots of organisations which have too many people who have been there too long.

Secondly, a lot of managers aren’t given training to develop the leadership skills of managing talent to drive productivity as well as support mental health. The talent manager’s job is ultimately to decide who to use and who to lose.?

Where you’ve got poor retention of future talent, taking steps to improve the mental wellbeing of your employees improves the health of your whole business.?

When employees feel overwhelmed and unsupported by managers that don’t know how to support their mental wellbeing, their productivity tanks and they start looking for the exit. The hidden costs of under skilled management are enormous – recruiting, training new hires, and dealing with the fallout in team morale and cohesion.

Managers and leaders can be taught to gain skills and confidence to support mental health through simple tools and daily practices in their workplaces. Once they start using them, the flow-on effect is improved team culture and productivity, which in turn improves retention. Again, the idea is to zoom out to see the big picture.

Here are some practical areas we helped a leadership team with recently:?

• Manager as a coach: Being explicit about being a coach meant managers were more comfortable in conversations about mental health where they previously hadn’t known what to say.?

• Empathy and understanding: Empathy in a manager is often overlooked as a leadership skill, but managers who are empathetic understand their team’s different working styles and what the individuals need, which fosters a sense of belonging.?

• Managing Stress: The key to stress at work is workload management – making sure people are not overloaded. That requires time management, but also good emotional awareness skills to observe peoples’ stress levels.?

• Enhanced Communication: Managers learn to communicate clearly and empathetically, reducing misunderstandings and building a positive team culture.?

• Difficult conversations: getting on to performance issues before they turn into conflict.?

• Effective Delegation: Smart delegation techniques allow managers to assign tasks and workload more effectively, so the team shared leveraged strengths and balanced workload during busy periods, all the while boosting team productivity.

Curious about how you can achieve this kind of transformation for your organization? The Active Manager Program equips managers with essential soft skills – communication, delegation, stress management, and empathy. Managers learn to support their teams effectively, reducing turnover and fostering a positive work culture.?

Ready to see the change? Book a consultation and let’s get started on creating a healthier, more productive work environment.