Four Skills That Enable Manager Excellence & Prevent Burnout
The confidence and competence of your managers can make or break your company culture.
Managers are the delivery vehicle of your company strategy and creators or breakers of your company culture.
If your managers are struggling in their roles, everybody loses. The business loses because the company-level strategy can't be delivered effectively. Your employees lose because they have a poor experience due to their manager being stressed and unhappy.
It's no secret that manager burnout and stress levels are extremely high, with a recent Microsoft study suggesting more than 50% of middle managers are burnt out.
Here's the problem we've identified at Better Happy from working with over 500 managers over the past three years:
Your managers are some of the most passionate and driven people in your business... that's why they found their way to management.
But the working style that served them so well throughout their career leading up to management is ill-suited for their management role.
Going from worker to manager is like going from running to swimming. Just because someone is good at running doesn't mean they are naturally going to be a good swimmer.
They have the attributes to be a good swimmer, i.e., the fitness and the work ethic.
But if they try to swim with their running technique, they're going to sink.
You have to teach the runner new skills AND new pacing techniques for them to adapt to being a good swimmer.
You have to do the same with your managers. Teach them new skills so they can adapt, and they will thrive in management. Leave them to it without any training, and they will rely on what they already know and likely sink (burnout).
Here are four underrated essential skills that will help your managers - and therefore employees and business - thrive.
1 - Team Engagement
Prior to management, people are generally great self-sufficient doers. Teaching your new and existing managers to now focus on leveraging others is important.
Getting others to want to do things and to do them well is a skill. For the person who is experienced in doing things themselves well, the temptation can be to do everything oneself instead of going through the challenge of training others.
We have found this resistance is compounded by two other common traits in managers: Perfectionism and Fear of Making Mistakes.
Often, managers want everything to be perfect and avoid making mistakes. Knowing that their teams are not as experienced or competent as them, they regularly choose to step in, save the day, and do things themselves.
The problem is, this limits the manager’s capacity and disempowers the team.
To overcome this, work with your managers on mindset and goals. Show them logically that their job is to empower a team and that they cannot hit their goals by doing things themselves.
Next, help them make peace with things not being perfect and mistakes being an inevitable part of the process. As long as mistakes are learned from, they are not really mistakes but growth moments for the manager, team member, and wider team.
2 - Reserving Time For Strategy
Pre-management, people are recognised and rewarded for being busy and working hard. This work ethos is also hardwired into British society; we're a hard-working nation.
This creates a unique challenge for managers that we see in at least 90% of the managers we work with. Managers feel guilty when they are not busy doing or reacting. Unsurprisingly, this leads to them keeping themselves busy with things like firefighting issues and taking on lots of new projects.
That might sound good, but it's bad. It's bad because it leaves no time for strategy, leadership, or team development. It leads to overcommitment, which stresses out the manager and is de-motivating for their team.
A pet hate of mine is when people cry out for 'evil business leaders' to stop demanding so much of their employees. It's not a business leader’s job to carefully consider the capacity of everyone in the business, then allocate the perfect amount of work accordingly... that is a ridiculous notion.
It's the job of confident, competent managers to communicate to leadership what the capacity of their teams is, what current goals are being focused on, and what can realistically be done in set periods of time.
For a manager to do that, they have to understand capacity. For a manager to understand capacity, they have to spend regular time being strategic, thinking about goals, and looking at commitments. Constantly being too busy to do this is a sure-fire way to end up with a burnt-out, overstretched, unhappy team and poor execution of business goals.
Train your managers to be confident enough to step away from busy reactiveness and regularly spend time on strategy.
3 - The Confidence To Say No
Leading neatly from skill two, we follow with the confidence to say no. It's human nature to be a yes person. Contrary to what the media might make you believe, most humans dislike any form of confrontation and will go out of their way to avoid it.
Prior to management, saying yes to a lot generally reflects well. It shows a person to have a positive, hard-working attitude. However, saying yes to everything in management is a recipe for disaster.
Train your managers that it's not only okay but essential for them to say no. Their job is no longer to take on as much as possible in the time they have available to them, but to help the company reach its goals.
In the modern, fast-paced, ever-changing world, it's not the companies or teams that can do the most that get ahead. It's the companies and teams who can do the least best that win.
So train and encourage your managers to become masters of doing a few things well by understanding their capacity, considering what's most important, and having the confidence to say no to everything that is a distraction.
A great book that helps with this, which we recommend to all managers and leaders in our training, is Essentialism by Greg Mckeown
4 - Prioritising Health & Self
Please don't pay lip service to this one. We all know 'health is important,' but hear me out on why it's particularly important for managers.
It's fair to say that most managers are middle-aged, let’s say between the ages of 27-37. I know it's more wide-ranging than that, but as an average.
So they're at an age where a lot of big changes are happening. After 30, biological changes mean that health is something you have to work harder to protect.
Many people around this age will take on their first house and the financial responsibilities that come with that.
Many people around this age will be starting or already have young families.
Now let's add to that the mindset shift that happens when they step up to management. Prior to management, the emphasis was on how hard this person could work. In management, the emphasis is on what results this person and their team can achieve.
That final change might sound subtle, but it's a huge change. It's the difference between switching off at the end of the day satisfied that you worked hard vs. never switching off because no matter how hard you worked, you might not have achieved your goals.
The combination of these different things means managers are very likely to neglect themselves and their health for other people, for their families, and their careers - and easily justify doing so.
This is, of course, a path to poor health and burnout.
So, once again, you have to actively encourage and support your managers to prioritise and look after themselves.
In our training, we teach attendees that a good manager is not the one who can do the most, but the one who is most effective. Management and leadership are a marathon, not a sprint.
Good leaders and managers play the long game. They manage workload for themselves and their teams. They take on an amount of work they and their team can deliver to a high standard without having to work constant overtime.
In developing this attitude and skill set, they deliver superior results over a longer period of time. They create a culture they and their teams enjoy, which leads to lower levels of stress and sickness alongside higher levels of retention, productivity, and good old-fashioned fun at work.
It's not rocket science... most businesses and managers are just too busy being busy to do the things they need to do to stop being so... busy.
Want us to level up your managers for you? We do it in as little as three days so you don't have to.
Find our more in the brochure below:
AUTHOR
Mike Jones Better Happy Founder
Mike is the Founder of Better Happy and the best selling author of The Happy Business Revolution.
He's passionate about health, happiness and making businesses and employees thrive - together.
Comments