Source employee feedback on managers & and get granular with data
To gather useful team member input on managers, make sure any questions you ask are direct and specific. Avoid less focused prompts such as, “I feel supported to make decisions on my own” or “I feel safe speaking up about issues.” The key is to identify what roles managers are playing in your team members’ current lack of engagement or feelings of frustration.
Here are some possible questions and prompts to include in engagement surveys:
- Does your manager provide clear expectations and guidance for your role?
- Does your manager regularly communicate about team goals and company objectives?
- Does your manager acknowledge your contributions and offer positive feedback?
- Does your manager support your professional growth?
- Does your manager help you avoid overwork and promote work-life balance?
- Do you feel comfortable talking to your manager about workplace conflicts or issues?
Include a few of these questions in regular engagement surveys and pulse surveys. You can also ask team members to discuss these issues during 360-degree evaluations.
Investigate results in depth to learn what managers are missing. For example, they may be great at promoting healthy work-life integration but struggle with assisting team member growth and development. Perhaps some of your team leaders have never managed anyone before and need training to support their reports’ professional goals better.
Set more meaningful goals for your people managers
Organizations often tie a manager’s success to their team’s results, but that doesn’t encourage managers to focus on other key aspects of their role, such as employee well-being, development, recognition, and workload management.
If these additional aspects of people management sound like a distraction from delivering outcomes, think again: According to McKinsey research, companies in which managers foster creativity and trust and build positive environments achieve better bottom-line returns.
To inform which goals you’ll prioritize for managers, take the time to analyze your employee data. Performance review analytics, for instance, would show if your team leads struggle with coaching their reports and supporting their long-term development.
After defining the most relevant objectives, utilize Leapsome’s Goals module to set and track manager targets, such as these:
- Supported by weekly check-ins, employees achieve 50% of their development goals within the next six months.
- Manager scores on engagement surveys increase by 20% on average within the next two survey cycles.
- Manager performance review scores on coaching and development increase by 10% in the next 360-degree evaluation.
Invest in manager training & development
According to a new study from researchers at the University of California and the University of Michigan, providing soft skills training to managers can help them be more effective in their roles and prevent them from churning. This suggests that it’s always valuable to put in the time and resources to train team leads, even if they already have a lot of experience in that role.
Skills like active listening, coaching, and conflict resolution are pivotal to great management but aren’t necessarily innate. Team leaders need learning and practice to perfect those competencies, especially those new to their roles. That’s why organizational leaders should:
- Use Leapsome’s Learning module to create interactive training courses tailored to help managers overcome challenges and skills gaps.
- Ask external manager training consultants to lead coaching and mentorship workshops
- Allow managers to attend more strategic planning meetings to learn about aligning company and team goals.
- Encourage team leads to meet with their cross-functional counterparts to learn more about their leadership practices.
Make expectations for managers explicit
If team leads are underperforming in certain areas, it could be due to a lack of clarity from the top down. “It’s important to define what successful management looks like and what not-so-successful management looks like for your organization,” says Jes Osrow.
To ensure your people managers have a clear sense of their governing parameters, you should:
- Create a managerial expectations statement where you outline management standards, connecting them to company values and business objectives.
- Have managers participate in regular performance reviews where their direct supervisor and direct reports evaluate them based on their leadership skills.
- Recognize and reward team leaders who excel at the manager-specific aspects of their role, such as coaching, active listening, and adaptability.
Resources for first-time managers
We compiled a comprehensive list of guides and articles aimed at helping new managers get up to speed. You can find these and other resources on our blog and knowledge hub.
Leadership
- How to improve work-life balance for employees
- The value & methods of employee empowerment
- Characteristics and benefits of the empowering leadership style
- The 11 best ways to engage remote employees & why they work
- How to give employees recognition & appreciation — even remotely [39 ideas + infographic]
Development
- Guide to prioritizing employee development
- 10 growth-oriented development ideas for employees
- 6 employee development plan examples to inspire growth
- How to have a career development talk with an employee
- 35 career development questions to ask your employees, yourself & your company
Feedback
- 27 employee feedback examples
- Manager's guide to celebrating success at work
- How to give constructive feedback to employees
- Why Good Leaders Don’t Just Give Feedback, but Ask For it Too
Performance & reviews
- 100 helpful performance review phrases
- 25 smart review questions for employee development
- 18 employee performance review templates to improve appraisals
- Employee performance goals & objectives | Examples & tips for 2023
- A manager's guide to better self-assessments (& self-evaluation examples)
Meetings
- 1:1 Meeting template for effective managers & top tips
- The purpose of 1:1 (one-on-one) meetings — with example questions
Compensation & promotion
Manage your people better with Leapsome
Developing successful people managers starts with the understanding that they need support, training, and accountability to become more proficient in their roles. A skilled team member isn’t automatically also a great leader — they need plenty of feedback on their managerial performance to help them grow.
Leapsome can help you pinpoint where managers need to improve, and it allows you to build the training and development resources to help them become more effective:
- Use our Surveys module to gather employee feedback on their team leads
- Our Goals module allows you to set more results-oriented management objectives
- With Leapsome Learning, you can create customized management training courses
- Use our Reviews module to evaluate managers based on their skills as team leaders and not as individual contributors.
In a dynamic work landscape, Leapsome provides the tools to empower managers — fostering an environment where they can excel, support their teams, and lead with confidence.
😁 Watch managers grow and employee satisfaction rates rise
Leapsome allows you to implement better people management strategies and track their success with in-depth analytics.
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