Manager: The Missing Link!

How do employees feel about your organization — employee experience [EE]? How is your organizational culture — [OC]?

These two questions get a lot of consideration and airtime in discussions about experience and culture. Unfortunately, like most of the cases, we are treating symptoms rather than the cause.

So where is the root?

It is in your Managers’ Experience.

ME is the most dominant factor in retention, development, engagement and performance, revenue and operational efficiency. Yet, it’s rarely talked about and least focused on.

Let’s first look into what employee experience is. The EE is the entire journey an employee takes with your organization. This includes these 7 key stages where employees interact with their organization in a pivotal way:

• Attract: Recruit top talent
• Hire: Pick the best possible talent
• Onboard: Make the entry comfortable and engaging
• Engage: Allow them to bring their best to work
• Perform: Drive expectation and results
• Develop: Orchestrate growth
• Depart: Exit with grace

It also includes things like the physical work ambiance, relationships with coworkers and the ways a job supports one’s overall lifestyle.

Where Manager Comes In?

If your organization is struggling to construct an engaging employee experience, it may be doing something fundamentally wrong.

Various researches have indicated that an employee’s interaction with their manager is one of the most important factors for their success and engagement at work. If we consider the 7 stages of employee life cycle, the influence of manager can not be underestimated.

• The quality and reputation of managers influence who you attract as prospect.
• Manager’s active involvement in recruitment process is positively correlated to employees’ overall fit for job and retention.
• When manager is directly involved in on-boarding process, the employee experience is 2.5 times more favorable for the on-boarding exercise [Gallup].
• Managers account to roughly 70% of the variance in their team’s engagement [Gallup].
• Only 2 in 10 employees agree that their performance is managed in a way that motivates them to do their best work [Gallup].
• Fifty-two percent of exiting employees say that their manager could have done something to prevent them from leaving their job [Gallup].

Clearly, if you want to fundamentally transform your employee experience, you must first fix your manager experience.

Questions to Consider:

• How can a disengaged manager engage employees?
• Why a manager should care about giving performance review if she/he view the process as biased?
• How can a confused manager drive culture?

If you can get your manager experience right, it will transform and grow every other aspect of your organization — from culture to performance management to customers experience and ultimately, the profit.

Managers are the bridge between leadership’s vision and the hard realities of the front line. Managers are your most passionate brand ambassadors and also the most brutal critics — providing most needed feedback that moves the organization forward while avoiding roadblocks and dead ends.

So, the real challenge is how to make your managers your stars, not your scapegoats. In my experience, I’ve noticed that many leaders and organization undervalue the importance of manager’s experience.

Here’s how you can work on manager’s experience building:

• Select managers carefully. Promote individual contributors, not solely on individual performance or on tenure. Select/Promote managers who have a natural flair for leading a team and who have demonstrated success working well with others. Fortunately, we have cool assessments available to help!
• Provide managers with the right support. Development programs are good, but rarely translate into managers feeling fully prepared for and inspired about their future. Leaders need to do a better job of investing in manager development — especially in teaching them to have more effective conversations with their team and their boss. You will see the greatest return on investment by tailoring managerial roles and development plans to an individual manager’s strengths rather than one-size-fits-all approach.
• Understand how it feels to be in their shoe. This only happens when we understand how critical their experience is for employee experience and overall organizational culture.

To conclude, managers experience is THE thing to focus in your 2020 strategy.