Three Steps to Building Managers Who Build Talent
Think of the best manager you ever had. You might describe this manager as someone who helped you raise your game, believed in you, or brought contagious energy and creativity to the workplace. Managers are absolutely central to an effective organizational talent management strategy. A recent study of senior-level talent leaders by Hewitt and the Human Capital Institute, however, found that, “Just 5% of organizations say their managers have the skills to grow people in their jobs or to provide constructive feedback that supports and encourages employee development . . .” Five percent! Think of the workforce potential that is lost. For a manager to be optimally effective in that talent management role, ensure you have these three foundational strategies in place.
1. Foster a Culture and a Leadership Team That Embraces Openness
The culture of an organization, as modeled by its senior leaders, greatly influences managers’ effectiveness in communicating with and developing their people. That’s because culture lays the foundation for an organization’s commitment to share, to listen, and to improve. Without a well-oiled, embraced feedback loop, employee development gets mired in defensiveness or mediocrity.
A fascinating article in a recent Harvard Business Review about Pixar – the animation powerhouse – discussed how Pixar strengthened their feedback loop. Rather than building ideas in isolation, they created weekly exchange sessions during which teams share in-process ideas. It is expected that everyone in attendance offer questions, concerns, and suggestions. Employees come not attached to their work, but to a successful corporate outcome.
This high expectation and open process has made for a more collaborative, innovative atmosphere that extends to interactions outside of those meetings. If Pixar’s culture were rooted in merely being “nice,” or conversely in harsh defensiveness, it’s likely that managers would operate that way as well and employees would not be as engaged or as creative.
2. Train Your Managers to Be Effective Managers and Talent Coaches
Even within the best of cultures, managing people can be tough. Employees bring their idiosyncrasies, their habits, and their likes and dislikes to the workplace. And what works for one staff member can be a disastrous management approach for another. Managers need ongoing training, and most gratefully accept it. Just as we seek to keep our technical skills sharp, so must we keep our people skills sharp. It takes a savvy manager to get people to grow in multiple ways and thus give breadth and depth to an organization. Empowering employees, challenging employees, even “realigning” employees can be done more effectively with guidance from someone who has been-there-done-that. Employee development is more difficult to learn through experience alone.
3. Ensure Manager Accountability for Staff Development
That which gets measured gets attention. I have worked with many organizations over the years and seen managers graded exclusively on their ability to deliver bottom-line goals. The assumption is that to achieve those goals, the manager must be developing his or her staff along the way. That’s simply not a given. And even if objectives are met with a modest level of staff development, think of the jump in outcomes if staff development was viewed as more than an add-on.
Staff development needs to be front and center. If the engagement and productivity of employees truly does determine bottom line results, why wouldn’t staff development be a critical review category in any manager’s performance appraisal, goals, or ongoing check-ins?
Organizational success is directly tied to the ability of managers to get the best out of their teams. To develop organizational success, enhance the ability of your managers to develop their employees and you’ll see a positive impact across your company.
