Managers hold the keys to the success of your business. They are a central connecting point between leaders and employees, filling so many different critical roles across your entire organization. However their importance is too often overlooked, and many companies do little to enable their success.
Instead of handing them a big, jumbled key ring full of keys that don’t work, mixed in with the unlabeled keys they need to do their jobs, it’s time to create a better system. This comprehensive guide will help you understand the key role your managers play, and how to enable them to be even more successful.
Why managers matter so much
Managers have a pretty massive impact on most of the key drivers of your organization’s success. They’re one of the most powerful drivers of organizational culture and performance, and the secret ingredient in high-performing cultures.
And that’s in large part because of their role as connectors. They occupy a unique position in between the people on the front lines—employees—and the people creating strategies and organizational goals at the top—leaders. They’re ideally on the ground connecting your company’s mission to the daily work employees do.
The vital role managers play in organizations is more than borne out by the data too: their impact on your company’s bottom line is major. Having a supportive manager more than doubles employee retention rates, according to recent research from Bonusly in partnership with Lighthouse. And, Gallup found that 70% of the variance in a team’s engagement rate is determined solely by the team’s manager.
The difference between having good managers and just ok ones (or even just a handful of bad ones) can be the difference between a high-performing organization and a struggling one.
What is manager enablement?
Highly effective managers aren’t born that way. They’re actively trained and supported: they're enabled, in other words.
Manager enablement is a component of performance enablement that focuses on training, coaching, and supporting managers to successfully enable their employees’ performance. A good manager enablement strategy sets managers up with everything they need to be incredibly effective, so their direct reports can perform at their best as well.
But enabling managers can be complicated. Good managers play so many roles, sometimes in a single day: coach, advisor, mentor, disciplinarian, project manager, inspiration source, and admin handler. Not to mention the fact they likely have their individual workload too.
Enabling managers effectively means supporting all of those different roles. It’s not easy, but it’s important. And while every organization, and every manager, is unique, there are some critical steps every company can take to better enable their managers.
5 ways to effectively enable managers
1. Train them
Almost two-thirds of managers can be described as “accidental managers,” according to Harvard Business Review: managers who were promoted into their roles because they were excellent individual contributors, not because they have the skills needed to manage people effectively. And too often, they don’t receive training to help them make that transition either.
Implementing required training for new managers helps bridge this gap. You can teach the skills necessary to be an effective manager; consider it a new manager onboarding program.
And don’t forget the training for skills needed to manage in remote and hybrid environments as well. Even experienced managers haven’t received much training in this area: Gallup research found that 70% of managers had no formal training in how to lead a hybrid team.
2. Unblock them
Even your best people managers might be running into roadblocks that hurt their ability to manage their teams effectively. Your leadership team should look carefully at what’s getting in their way: poor internal mobility prospects that hurt their ability to retain their best people, organizational silos that make working on larger projects a struggle, outdated tools and technology, or too much admin work and too little time to spend on their people-focused tasks.
Leadership can, and should, focus on clearing these roadblocks to free managers up to do their best work. It does require some deep strategy work and a willingness to look at the issues in your organization, which isn’t easy, but it can yield significant results.
3. Listen to them
It’s a best practice for managers to check in with their employees every week and ask them how they’re feeling, what’s going on, and where they need support, among other vital questions. But how often are your HR and leadership teams checking in with your managers to ask them the same questions?
Talk to them regularly—and when they talk, be sure to listen. These conversations are how you’ll uncover the roadblocks we just mentioned, concerns about their teams, and anything that’s contributing to them being burned out or disengaged.
4. Support them
Managers have a lot on their plate: too much, in many organizations. The overwhelm is so real that 42% of them are burned out. They need much more support from their leadership teams to combat how much they’re being asked to take on and to help them manage their work so they have time to coach and enable their direct reports too.
Give them the tools they need to juggle that workload more effectively, for sure, but also help them to get that non-managerial admin work off their plates so they can focus on their people. That’s the most effective way to combat manager burnout.
5. Speak to them
While listening to your managers is vital, communication is a two-way street. A big part of enabling your managers is communicating with them frequently—probably way more frequently than you’re doing right now.
Keep them in the loop about organizational changes, upcoming initiatives, and anything that might affect employees. They’re the ones who will be fielding any questions, so preparing them with as much information as possible benefits everyone.
And don’t just stick to the tactical stuff: communicate regularly with them about the mission, vision, strategy, and goals for the whole organization too. They can help connect those dots for employees to keep them engaged if you enable them to do so.
Finally, communicate expectations and requirements clearly so managers know exactly what’s expected of them in their roles. For example, if you want managers to meet with employees every week in 1:1s, tell them that (and make sure they have time to do so). If you want them to give employees more frequent feedback (which you should!), communicate that and train them in how to give effective feedback too.
Takeaways
Managers are the levers for so many critical functions in your company: they’re coaches, connectors, and creators of organizational culture, among many other key roles. So proactively and strategically enabling them to perform all those roles at the top of their game will take your entire organization to a new level of performance and profit.
By ensuring your managers are properly trained, provided with the necessary tools, and given the time to do the people-focused parts of their jobs, you’ll enable them, their teams, and the whole company.
