Editorial
As we approach year-end, businesses are intensifying efforts to meet 2023 targets and set 2024 objectives. In our tumultuous world of macro-economic and geopolitical uncertainty, there is another $8.8 trillion-dollar risk that threatens these ambitions. It’s employee engagement, which has steadily declined since 2020. In 2023, only 31% of employees say they are engaged and energized by their work.
Engagement is, in large part, driven by one’s direct manager. In fact, 69% of workers say their boss influences their mental health as much as their spouse does. When bosses fail to hold up their end of the bargain, employees jump ship.
Why are managers struggling to drive engagement? First, we must understand the complexity of the new world of work as several workplace trends converge.
The Manager Job Is Becoming Unmanageable
In 2023, a whopping 79% of middle managers say they’re at risk of burnout from the stress of managing people. While training can help, it cannot reduce the sheer complexity, workload, pace and stress of the job. Why is this?
The New Employer-Employee Social Contract
In our complex post-pandemic, hybrid, complex world of work, employees expect to be able to bring their whole, authentic selves to work and want more manager support than ever before. They seek flexibility, autonomy and a sense of purpose and belonging. In short, people are reassessing the role work occupies in their lives. Meanwhile, investors want better, faster value creation, and CEOs want productivity gains and in-office presence. In short, we are experiencing one of the largest re-negotiations of the employer-employee social contract in modern history, and managers are caught in the middle.
A Collective Reduction in Empathy
In a world where one can order coffee, ride to work, buy clothes, deposit checks, order groceries, and work out all without human interaction, our opportunities to connect are plummeting. The future looks even dimmer, given technological advancements such as driverless cars and AI. Empathy is considered an essential leadership skill and can help rally teams around a common mission and create psychological safety. However, Americans are lonelier than ever before and collective empathy is at an all-time low. With 52% of employees believing that their company’s efforts to be empathetic are dishonest, and given the structural disadvantages imposed by a global pandemic and technology, managers have an impossible job.
Pre-pandemic, organizations already fell short on leadership effectiveness, and the new world of work has exacerbated the problem. The good news is that leader development is 2024’s top CHRO priority, according to Gartner. How, then, can organizations translate this investment into leadership effectiveness?
Related Article: Why We Need Middle Managers
Identifying and Correcting Manager Blindspots
Here is a practical guide, which incorporates not just training but practical experience and the power of coaching. It starts before the promotion.
Early Engagement
Educate early: Individuals are often promoted into managerial roles based on their performance as an individual contributor, not their leadership skills. Executives must clearly communicate their expectations of leaders and how this differs from being a great individual contributor. A star engineer must understand that being a manager would require her to spend significantly less time writing code and more time building teams, managing performance, developing talent and communicating upward. Consider giving candidates early exposure to leadership responsibilities such as a stretch assignment to lead a project team in the run-up to a promotion.
Provide timely training: Too many organizations offer training and development opportunities after promoting people into managerial positions, thereby creating a “sink or swim” scenario. Barring exceptions such as “battlefield promotions,” training must begin months before a promotion and continue well into the manager’s journey. After all, one wouldn’t start training for a marathon on the day of the race.
Construct dual-career paths: Many star performers do not want to move into managerial roles, but career and pay growth continues to be a concern for this group. Seventy percent of middle managers would return to an individual contributor role if they could keep the same pay. Rethink career pathing to create dual career tracks for both leaders and individual contributors to grow their careers and pay, maximizing the value of star individual contributors and optimizing the manager pipeline for those who have a true passion for developing talent.
At Promotion
Design manageable workloads: Organizations must systematically assess the responsibilities, span of control and learning curve of the job with each managerial promotion. Striking a fine balance between stretch and strain targets is key. One common risk is applying the “player-coach” model universally. Companies have adopted this model to control operating expenses, but setting up a new leader for success requires intentional role design.
If a new Operations Manager must lead a junior team of five and serve as an individual contributor on her own projects while earning the team’s trust, influencing peers, and learning a new job at the same time, she may be set up for failure. However, this model may work for a Quality Lead who manages an experienced team of two with established protocols, thereby allowing the manager to assist with a backlog of quality checks when needed. The larger the team size, and higher the complexity of the work, the more difficult it becomes to sustain the player-coach model without risk of burnout or missing targets.
Cultivate enterprise-wide empathy: Empathy is an essential leadership trait, and while leaders must develop this skill early on, creating a compassionate, empathetic workplace requires work from all employees. If we fail to see empathy as an organizational muscle that must be built and flexed repeatedly, we risk perpetuating the leadership effectiveness gap. Therefore, empathy must be expected from and taught to not only leaders, but all employees.
As They Grow
Support the evolution of leaders: As leaders progress from front-line manager ranks to middle management, senior leadership and eventually the C-suite, the share of time spent on people matters drastically increases, and time spent on technical aspects of the job reduces. What works early in the leadership journey is not what will keep managers successful as they grow. Consequently, organizations must design and deliver programs that educate leaders about building social capital, influencing peers, managing up, resolving conflict and exhibiting executive presence as they grow. One of the most effective ways to do this is to augment traditional training with internal and external coaching resources.
Equip leaders to navigate a changing world: Given the new employer-employee social contract, leadership is evolving from managing work to leading the whole person. Leading through the new, ever-changing world of work requires going beyond management basics and focusing on resilience, agility, managing through uncertainty and cultivating self-awareness. Great programs are ones that teach people not only how to lead, but how to live.
Actively listen to middle managers: Humans need to be seen and heard. Leaders are no different. Managers serve as a conduit of information flow and can play a critical role in helping executives understand the evolving needs of employees. Executives often implement changes like return-to-office mandates and layoffs, which leave middle managers to pick up the crumbs of a disengaged and anxious workforce. While some difficult business decisions are inevitable, actively seeking input from middle managers is a critical factor in driving leadership effectiveness and building great cultures.
Provide off-ramps: Ongoing talent assessments may determine that some managers are not effective people leaders. Other managers may reach this conclusion themselves. Organizations must be deliberate about installing off ramps in the leadership journey and normalize rotating back into an individual contributor role, thereby reducing the stigma attached to the idea of “stepping down.”
Conference
Sep
16
HR Tech Conference Las Vegas 2025
Register
Conference
Oct
27
Gartner HR Symposium/Xpo Orlando 2025
Register
Related Article: Middle Management Is Stuck. Time for a Reset
What Brought Us Here Will Not Take Us There
As Judith Wiese of Siemens points out, “the turmoil of the past few years has thrust leaders into learning how to lead very differently and to relinquish some formerly prescribed methods.” By addressing blindspots through early engagement, mindful promotion practices, continuous development, and strategic off-ramps, organizations can develop resilient leaders equipped to navigate the complexities of the modern workplace. The future of leadership development lies in adapting to change, fostering empathy and nurturing leaders capable of leading with a profound understanding of the evolving needs of their teams.
Learn how you can join our contributor community.
