Month: March 2023

I was 9 years old, studying in the 3rd grade – when I would struggle to see what the teacher wrote on the blackboard. When I struggled to see the math problems, I usually relied on my memory to hear what the teacher said and solved the math question. This eventually became a routine. It took 8 months and a visit to an ophthalmologist to figure out that I was far sighted and needed spectacles. To me, this is a classic case of denial – unwillingness to admit flaws, defects or anything anomalous. The tendency is to “adjust” and a lot of women do it regularly (professionally or personally). 

To help women succeed as managers, it’s important to make them self aware of their areas of competency – strengths and gaps. 

How does one do it?

By sharing feedback through conversations or encouraging them to get their ‘people perception’ profile evaluated. How well are they perceived to communicate? Do they set expectations clearly? Do they stay true to their commitments? …encouraging them to ask many such questions to themselves and the people they collaborate with. Usually it’s difficult to get objective, unbiased feedback through conversations, hence it’s best to use anonymous tools to understand strengths and blind spots.

Assessments also help break stereotypes wherein determined and competitive women have been deemed too masculine and collaborative and family-oriented women are too feminine for a workspace. 

A technology company couples this with weekly “Appreciation Tennis”, where the reporting manager also talks about the positive micro-decisions they saw the female colleague take and asks them to share their own inventory of things done well. Create a safe space to acknowledge both achievements and vulnerabilities.  Encourage them to seek help – show them how to do it.

Our educational system and on-the-job training, prepare us reasonably well for functional skills. Relationship skills are what we expect managers to acquire as they get promoted – possibly as a function of experience.

To help women succeed in managerial roles, help them first understand how one succeeds in a managerial role at your organization and what it takes to get there. The measures of success in managerial roles in two consulting companies may also differ, if one is a startup and the other is a global brand, although their services may be very similar.

While this was about ascertaining capability, being ‘able to speak up’ is a common hurdle women face, when it comes to demonstrating capability. 

Research suggests that men do 75% more  talking, during regular business meetings.

This isn’t obvious because men have more to say. Confidence plays a huge role. As an HR / Business leader or a working professional, give women colleagues the opportunity to lead meetings and thereby build confidence. Prep them up, use positive interjections like “that’s an interesting point of view”, to validate their ideas. 

At Great Manager Institute®, we have created a Community that allows female managers from our client organizations to seek mentoring/coaching and a networking opportunity with a Community of other Managers/Leaders.

Everyone has their own personal brand. But not everyone knows how to make it work in their favor. A brand differs from a product, in the fact that a brand is usually derived through how others (typically customers) perceive you. In today’s world, everyone is our customer – be it professionally or personally, and every interaction is a moment of truth.

To help women succeed as leaders, organizations must help them understand what their personal brand today looks like. Help women colleagues identify forums where they can talk about their work, their leadership style and brand themselves – without thinking “how much is too much?”.

Begin by giving women a voice at the table. If your female colleague has a great idea, champion her and  make sure she gets the applause, instead of letting someone else take the credit. 

Lastly, however contrarian it may sound – if your company is invited to participate in a panel, refuse to take part if there is no female representation on that panel. The first step to change is to demonstrate the change through your own actions.

While designing policies, companies must have enough representation from women to support their growth as people leaders. Policies dictate the day-to-day working of the company. If we wish to create a managerial panel that is gender-diverse, we must start from the very bottom. Research shows that the new service economy relies heavily on women’s natural abilities for long-term strategic vision and community building. Having more women in managerial positions is the first step to fixing the depleting pipeline of women leaders in our organizations.

Implementing these strategies will help you support the growth of more women as people leaders.

You can’t improve what you don’t measure. When it comes to employee engagement there are three categories of metrics that should be collected and analyzed on a regular basis. If you are not conducting exit interviews, it is an important first step to understanding. The interview should be conducted by someone on your HR/People team and the goal should be to translate the conversation into discrete data that can be used for reporting and analysis. Break it down by departments or business units so that you can see where specific issues may be more predominant. Also, develop a set of standard “reasons” for why an employee might depart the organization. Allow for the ability to collect up to three, in ranked order; it is not always a single reason why someone has chosen to leave an organization. You may learn that the employee resigned because they were offered another opportunity for more money, but also discover that they sought out the opportunity because their manager was showing favoritism to other employees and the department culture had become uncomfortable to work in. 

Collecting this information is not a perfect science, but it can shed a lot of light on opportunities for improvement.

At least quarterly, if not monthly, your company should send out employee engagement surveys. This can be tricky because employees can get survey fatigue. Select a survey instrument that strikes the right balance between not providing enough meaningful and actionable information and one that employees stop responding to because it takes up too much time. Tracking the response rate is important because it is also a sign of overall engagement. If employees aren’t responding, it could be because they don’t trust the company to either act on their feedback or keep it anonymous. Encourage managers to routinely ask their team members to complete the survey and emphasize how important it is to the company to understand what is working for people, and what is not. Employees should feel there is substantial weight placed on their anonymous responses.

Know your turnover rate and track how company activities and engagement strategies are impacting it; this is as important as tracking supply costs or productivity. We recommend this metric be part of monthly leadership meetings and shared openly with employees. To calculate your attrition rate, you simply take the number of separations divided by your avg number of employees and multiply by 100.

Engagement is a broad term and can easily become awash in leadership jargon. Be intentional about what employee engagement means to your organization and make sure your managers can fluently articulate it. How do you want to describe the experience your employees have working for your company; give yourself something to shoot for. Most companies will have mission, vision, and values statements; all important directional anchors to help guide decision-making and culture. It is equally important to have a well-articulated engagement statement that serves as a strategy. Imagine while a manager is interviewing a candidate, the candidate asks them what working for your company is really like. They might say, “we strive to build diverse and trusting teams, empower our people to innovate and create, make sure management is listening, and remain as flexible as practical to promote a healthy work-life balance.” This engagement statement should remain dynamic and can be fine-tuned as it is informed by what you are learning from employees.

Now you are collecting data and measuring all the right things. Your employees know you are collecting this information, so it is a positive signal that you want to improve. Many companies stop here and fail to connect the dots between collecting data and acting on it. Consider the steps we are outlining here as a continuous feedback loop. The data you are collecting is describing the current state of employee engagement at your company. Your employee engagement statement describes your desired future state of engagement; comparing these two tells your frontline managers where the opportunities exist.

Our 3 ways to reduce attrition revolve around your managers because they are the connecting links between organizational culture and employee experience. Our research shows that 67% of attrition and retention is induced by managers. The same research also shows that 64% of employees with ineffective managers plan to leave their organization.

Managers should be transparent with employees about the gaps and opportunities so that they can engage with them on solutions. An easy trap with any process where you are seeking out information about an employee’s experience is that it can create a culture of problem-identifiers. Managers can instead create a culture that is solutions-oriented where employees feel ownership for the steps taken to improve their workplace. Maybe a manager learns that there are hiring decisions they have made that bring the wrong skill set or personality type into certain roles, or teams.

The Manager can meet with people closest to the work and build a new hiring qualifications profile or set of interview questions. Perhaps the data suggests that one manager is viewed as “not competent”. You might spend more time with that manager to understand where they struggle and if training or coaching is a worthy investment. Common in most survey responses are opportunities to improve communications. Pull a cross-section of employees together and brainstorm tactics to improve.

No matter how you connect the dots, managers should have an ongoing plan that reflects what is being learned through your company’s feedback loop so they can drive toward solutions.

Help your managers plan to prioritize; eventually, they will see improvements and get closer and closer to creating the work environment and experience your teams will want to remain a part of.

Great Manager Institute’s leadership development platform automatically converts team feedback into recommended actions for people managers.

Do your frontline managers know what outcome you are after? If not, begin having that conversation. It might surprise them to know that people finding joy in their work is an organizational ambition that also applies to their own roles. Managers are not likely driving toward an outcome they knew nothing about, so create universal awareness.

Workers want purpose in their jobs and that means there has to be some alignment between organizational values and those of workers. Do your company values easily come to mind? Do your managers and their teams know them without looking them up on the company website? It is not uncommon if they don’t. Take a look at your company’s core values and put them to the test. Do they reflect who you are? Can they be difficult to embrace all the time (they should be, otherwise they are table stakes)? Do they match your culture? Are there stories that prove they are lived? Core values should be tested in how you make decisions, what decisions you make, and how people in the organization treat one another. When hiring, managers should know how to seek out candidates that are intrinsically motivated by similar values.

The workforce of today includes people who are acquiring new skills and knowledge continuously, people who want to grow and develop, people who want to be valued for all they have to offer, not just the skills required by a job description, or inherent in a title. Consider creating broader and more flexible job titles and reimagine how you define people’s contribution by labeling their skills and accomplishments. Managers, as coaches, should work with their teams on an individual level to get clarity around each worker’s desired career paths.

People travel to faraway places to be immersed in different cultures so they can broaden their own life experiences. Workers want that same immersion in the workplace, be it in-person, remote, or hybrid. Inclusive and diverse hiring is a great first step, but to thrive managers will need a lot of help and practice learning to communicate in a multicultural environment and to do so will need 1) a feedback loop created by reflective and active listening, 2) to be vulnerable enough to ask for help in understanding various cultures, 3) respect – not frustration – in their tone and body language, and 4) determination to learn.

Authenticity and honesty matter when communicating with workers. Research tells us that the human brain has a hardwired bias toward the negative which can cause us to act irrationally. Companies can sometimes spin messages to workers in an effort to counterbalance the bias. Managers especially, have to walk a fine line between being overly negative in their words, tone and body language while not being perceived as inauthentic or dishonest. This, again, speaks to the importance of professional development for managers with heavy emphasis on communication.

Intentionally build a culture of teamwork and collaboration. All great accomplishments are the result of collaborations in one form or another and great accomplishments bring fulfillment (joy). You can’t build the culture you want without listening to the stories being told by people doing the work; they are your feedback loop. Those stories come about based on the words and actions of you and your managers. If your words and actions support teamwork and collaboration, that is what you’ll hear in those stories.  Surveys and exit interviews are great tools, but nothing can take the place of listening to people where they work.

HR leaders are faced with many challenges and opportunities in their day-to-day life. There is no doubt you will need strategies and tactics to deal with the competitive forces in your market that make sourcing and recruiting great talent an ongoing challenge. You will have to develop the communication, project management, and digital tools needed to manage change and minimize change fatigue. You will have to reimagine your workforce by understanding what blend of onsite, hybrid, remote, and freelance workers can best meet the needs of your customers. However, with the fundamentals necessary to help people find true joy in their work firmly in place, these challenges will be achievable opportunities.