Managerial Development

“Billions of dollars are spent each year on manager development. Yet only one in three managers strongly agree that they have had opportunities to learn and grow in the last year”

Managing isn’t a great experience for most people. Work is worse for them than for the people they manage.

Managers report more stress and burnout, worse work-life balance, and worse physical wellbeing than the individual contributors on the teams they lead.

Managers’ jobs are extremely difficult because they’re caught between leadership and the front line.

Market disruptions and opportunities that require sudden organizational change hit the organization at the point of the manager.

Managers are less likely to know what’s expected of them than the people they manage.

The job of managing comes with frequently shifting priorities and having to manage individual personalities on a team.

It’s no surprise that organizations aren’t getting the most out of their workforces.

MANAGERIAL DEVELOPMENT

According to the people receiving manager development training, the programs in place don’t work. One traditional approach to manager development is to identify the desired
competencies of managing and then teach those competencies to each manager. Sounds reasonable. But this approach doesn’t work because it overlooks a critical principle of human nature – everyone develops differently based on their unique strengths.

While it’s crucial for the managers of the future to know and develop the individual strengths of their employees, it’s also essential that they know and develop their own strengths. No one can be expected to be good at all things in all situations. Managers develop within the context of who they naturally are and can’t be forced into a box that prescribes one style.

Gallup finds that learning and development programs that acknowledge the strengths of individual managers outperform all others.

When considering exactly how to develop your managers, include the following recommendations:

Start with the classroom learning that teaches managers the fundamentals of strengths-based leadership – including deep learning on strengths, engagement and performance coaching

Deploy curricula that teach managers to shift from being a boss to being more like a coach.

Deploy ongoing e-learning experiences that advance the concepts taught during classroom learning.

Require executives to have strengths-based conversations once a week with each manager or team leader.