Five ways to cultivate great managers

Authored by Joan Goodwin, Dan Haddad, and Lauren Kirby.

A call for leadership development

Great managers are critical for keeping teams engaged and flourishing. Gallup estimates that low employee engagement costs the global economy $8.8 trillion in a single year.¹ The primary cause of this disengagement? A lack of developed manager and leaders. Technical skills are not enough to create an engaging leader. If organizations don’t want to see their workforce apathetic and uninspired (while feeling it in their bottom line), they must invest in developing great managers.

What makes for a great manager?

Managers need to operate at the intersection of strategy, performance, and development, all while leading their teams with engagement and inspiration. They must help their teams operate with agility, achieve results, and grow individual team members’ skills—with empathy and authenticity. More than 97% of respondents in a 2021 survey felt that leading with empathy and authenticity was important for an effective manager, but only 45% of respondents said their manager did so.² High-performing managers who serve both the organization and their team members as performance coaches do three things well:

• Great managers inspire action: Managers need to set a vision for their teams that aligns to broader organizational goals and strategies. This fosters a sense of purpose and belonging within teams, enabling them to recognize the direct impact of their individual contributions on the organization. Managers should also look to energize their team members by motivating them, creating engaging work experiences, and encouraging them to be their authentic selves in the workplace.
• Great managers guide work: Managers should actively support their teams in prioritizing crucial tasks, milestones, and deliverables, enabling them to focus on the most significant and impactful work for the team’s success. Managers should also look to direct the work, providing their team members with the right information they need to complete work successfully. They’re also expected to play an adviser role and act as a subject matter specialist when their team members need help.
• Great managers cultivate growth: In order to develop manager capabilities, organizations should focus on equipping managers with the skills to become effective performance coaches. Managers that play a coach role focus on providing their team members with opportunities to develop new skills and provide real-time appreciative and constructive coaching and feedback to recognize and improve performance. Great managers know the strengths and development areas for their team members, assess the skills needed to perform tasks, and allocate work equitably in a way that enables team members to build and strengthen their skills and capabilities.

Five ways organizations can develop great managers

Now is the time to act. The longer organizations wait to invest in their managers, the more they risk losing employee engagement and retention—and great talent at all levels. Get started by focusing on five key steps:

1. Get the right data: Having the right survey data will help you better understand your workforce’s level of engagement and your managers’ impacts on their engagement. With the right data, organizations can develop meaningful conclusions and make smarter decisions on where to invest in manager upskilling.
2. Develop career agility: Examine your organization’s job architecture, career paths, and workforce planning approach to create more flexible career options for managers and employees in your manager pipeline. This flexibility provides opportunities and creates belonging for “low manager aptitude” talent to remain with the organization as technical specialists.
3. Create a manager center of excellence (COE): Build the infrastructure needed for a manager COE responsible for developing managers. It can also create manager communities and coaching pods across your organization that managers can use to network, learn, and support one another.
4. Rethink performance and rewards: If you’re only rewarding managers for their impact on operational and sales key performance indicators (KPIs), it may be time to consider how to incorporate their people-centric KPIs. For example, this could be including team engagement and upward feedback scores into your performance management and rewards philosophies. Intentionally incentivizing managers for developing and engaging their teams creates better leaders and enhances your employee value proposition for managers and entry-level workers alike.
5. Assess manager readiness the right way: Consider your enterprise’s philosophy on management and people leadership. As an organization, understand what the role of a manager really is. Align on the standard responsibilities all managers should have, the outcomes they should shape and influence, and the behaviors and skills they need. Formalize these expectations in your job architecture and the role profile for each manager’s role.³ Next, look at the responsibilities and expectations of specific roles and understand the type of manager you will need. Then, focus on the individual aspirations, attributes, and experiences of the candidate. Some candidates may be vocal about their management aspirations, some may have displayed strong emotional intelligence and value peer-to-peer connection, while some may have led informal teams in their existing roles.

What if a great employee isn’t a fit to be a great manager?

A lack of manager readiness does not mean an individual’s career options are limited within your organization. Consider employing a skills-based career agility strategy for your more technical workers. This allows you to rethink career progression at your organization to create opportunities for workers without manager skill sets to still advance throughout the organization and contribute in meaningful ways.⁴ Broadening your portfolio of career tracks to include individual and people leader tracks can help your organization keep highly skilled members of the workforce and develop managers who prioritize human outcomes along with the organization’s outcomes.

The right mindset moving forward

When most organizations look to assess manager readiness, they look at talented individual contributors who consistently bring in-depth knowledge, problem-solving skills, and innovative thinking to their roles and tasks. Organizations often deprioritize or even completely neglect the significance of an individual’s capability to be an effective people leader. While technical success provides a strong foundation for short-term success of a manager, the absence of people leadership and management will not provide managers and organizations the sustainable results that they need. Managers who lack the abilities to motivate, coach, and inspire may create teams that are inefficient, disengaged, wasteful, and unproductive.⁵ Organizations must rethink the behaviors they value in managers, how they develop them, and how they assess their readiness.

Authors:

• Joan Goodwin
• Dan Haddad
• Lauren Kirby

Contributors:

• Vicki Walter

Endnotes:

¹ Gallup, State of the global workplace: 2023 report, accessed December 1, 2023.
² Deloitte, “Team management priorities in the hybrid environment,” March 10, 2023.
³ Deloitte, “Job architecture and your human capital management system: Enhancing the talent experience,” 2020.
⁴ Manu Rawat et al., “Cultivating career agility in the new world of work,” Deloitte Capital H Blog, October 6, 2022.
⁵ Jay Bhatt, Colleen Bordeaux, and Jen Fisher, “The workforce well-being imperative,” Deloitte Insights, March 13, 2023; Ken Royal, “Heard of the U.S. quit rate? Win the war for talent now,” Gallup Workplace, July 12, 2019.