THE COST OF BAD MANAGEMENT

The results are in!

According to the 2024 Gallup State of the Global Workplace:

Disengaged employees are costing the global economy 8.9 trillion dollars, or 9% of the GDP.

With Gallup also citing that 70% of the variances in employee engagement is down to the manager – it’s safe to say that a very large portion of poor performance is down to bad management.

Just ponder on that for a moment. Almost 10% of our global output is down to bad managers who create stress and cause their people to look for work elsewhere.

Our level of job satisfaction is highly dependent on how well we get along with our boss. They will either recognise our efforts, ensure we get the right training, make us feel appreciated, and ensure we’re fairly paid, or not. If we don’t have a strategic, encouraging, fair and reasonable boss, it becomes very difficult to enjoy our job, no matter how intrinsically rewarding the work may be.

But before we start pointing fingers at managers as the source of all our engagement problems – let’s first put ourselves in their shoes. This year, Gallup reported that “managers have more negative daily experiences than non-managers and are more likely to be looking for a new job” (Gallup 2024 Key Insights Report, p.2).

Managers are having the hardest time of all of workers. In addition to managing their own workloads, expectations of upper management, and the productivity of their teams, they are also facing new demands for worker flexibility and an increased risk of employee mental health problems.

To lift engagement and productivity, we need to better support managers. Gallup also reports that when managers are engaged, their teams are more likely to be engaged:

• Across countries, when managers are engaged, employees are more likely to be engaged.
• In best-practice organizations, three-fourths of managers and seven in 10 non-managers are engaged.

If you want to create happy, healthy, high performing teams – you need to focus on creating happy, healthy, high performing managers

Don’t axe the training budget – double down on it

In the current economic climate – it’s easy to let the training and development budget be the first thing to axe. But great companies do the opposite – they double down on investing in star performers because they understand that their capacity to lead, inspire and manage others will be the difference between getting the best out of their workforce, and getting the bare minimum.

Great companies keep a pipeline of trained superstars up their sleeves so that when internal promotion opportunities come along, they have a pool of capable and motivated people to draw on. They set their people up for success in management roles by investing in their leadership skills well before they become someone’s boss.

Luxury Escapes is an online travel tech company well ahead of the curve on developing management capacity.  For the past three years, I’ve partnered with Luxury Escapes to deliver their in-house Future Leaders Program – a program focussed on developing the leadership capabilities and internal profiles of talented people looking to escalate their careers. As well as incorporating my INSPIRE leadership training sessions, participants are paired with an executive mentor and are given the opportunity to pitch their ideas for innovations in a “shark tank” style presentation to the executive team.

This week we kicked off our fourth cohort in as many years, but the program itself pre-dated my time there. It has as strong internal brand. Being selected to participate is an honour and is known as a fast-track to promotion.

Focus on building these leadership skills

To support managers to not just survive but thrive in the role, a good training program will cover these skillsets:

• Planning and creating strategy that enables achievement of organisational strategy
• Communicating and translating big picture goals into team and individual goals
• Being culture role models – living and breathing high standards of behaviour that match the organisational values
• Being the ‘voice of the customer’ – listening and responding to customer feedback, and finding ways to innovate new solutions to customer opportunities
• Managing the performance of people – giving regular feedback that builds awareness and job effectiveness using both formal and informal methods
• Coaching, training and developing capability in others according to individual unique personalities, strengths, goals and aspirations
• Communicating succinctly, confidently, and effectively through the various mediums and methods adopted within the organisation

Don’t fall into the common trap of promoting technically skilled people into management positions without upskilling them in people leadership skills first.  Leading teams is a skillset that can be trained, learned and mastered, just like any technical skillset. Poor managers lead to disengaged teams that cost the business both in time and in reputation.

My INSPIRE program is a proven, cost and time effective program that develops the mindset and skillset of people leaders. Through a series of 4 x half day workshops that can be flexibly delivered online or in-person, participants practice simple yet effective tools to lead high performing teams and maintain exceptional engagement scores. Supported by my book, my podcast, simple how-to guides and cheat sheets, this program has received incredible feedback from leaders at every level – from senior executives right through to frontline employees. Reach out to me if you’d like to discuss how I can help you support your managers and lift engagement in your business.