Every company wants happy, competent managers. The happiness and competence levels of your managers directly affect many things in your business, but three you should pay close attention to are:
Culture: Happy managers create engaged teams and positive cultures, unhappy managers create stressed teams and negative cultures.
Results: Competent managers drive consistent results, struggling managers struggle to find consistency.
Profitability: Happy competent managers increase profitability through productivity, struggling managers decrease profitability through lack of productivity and employee turnover.
When your managers are in a good place, everybody wins, and vice versa for when they aren't.
Over the past five years, we've had the privilege to develop hundreds of managers from a variety of businesses, and what we've recognised is that the majority are struggling in their role.
Multiple studies suggest that what we have seen is widespread.
So how do you prevent or address this challenge?
The mistake we commonly see is companies reactively addressing symptoms.
Our managers are stressed because they are working too much... let's provide some time management training.
Our managers are overwhelmed and unhealthy... let's provide some wellbeing support and resources.
When there is a widespread problem, there is an underlying root cause.
Take bad backs, for example. It's a widespread issue in the UK. What's the underlying root cause? Excessive sitting and lack of physical activity.
If you don't address the root cause, you are left constantly firefighting, reacting to symptoms.
With bad backs, you are paying for physio, paying for a chiropractor, wearing back supports, taking pain killers and anti-inflammatories.
All of these reactive 'solutions' only provide temporary relief and cost a lot. The bad back never really goes away, and people fall into the trap of 'accepting their fate,' believing their bad back is for life.
The same is happening with manager stress and burnout.
The root cause of the issue is a lack of the required level of confidence to manage well in the modern environment. The level of confidence required by a manager today is 10x higher than what it was in the past.
In the not-too-distant past (industrial revolution period), a manager's job was to receive targets then ensure employees were doing their repetitive tasks as efficiently as possible to hit those targets.
To do well, a manager had to be good at taking orders and spotting inefficiencies.
Today, in the age of technology, hyper-connectivity, and rapid change, a manager's job is to:
Manage the expectations of multiple stakeholders
Plan around multiple projects
Engage and motivate their team
Drive a culture of innovation and collaboration
Ensure that standards are met and projects completed
For your managers to thrive, be happy, and not overwhelmed in this environment, they don't need amazing time management skills... they need confidence.
If you don't help your managers develop a good level of confidence, no matter how much training, holidays, and wellbeing support you provide them, they will always struggle.
Just like if you don't help the person with the bad back become more active and build their core strength, no matter how many chiropractor sessions you pay for, their bad back will never disappear.
"But our managers are already confident, we promote confident people," you might say, but there are different types of confidence, and the type of confidence required to lead and manage is in a category of its own.
Take, for example, the confidence to say no to or push back on a request... from someone more senior than you. That takes a hell of a lot of confidence that - from our experience - most managers don't have.
What happens when a manager says yes to everything in the busy modern world? They take on too much, which overwhelms both them and their teams. When that goes on for too long? Burnout.
Or how about the confidence to make mistakes? Nobody likes making mistakes, but what happens when a manager is terrified at the prospect of making a mistake? They try to do everything perfectly, which leads to overworking and micromanagement. Bad for the manager and bad for the team.
What about the confidence to slow down and plan? To do a few things well instead of everything? Again, most managers don't have the confidence to do this. So they keep themselves busy doing and taking on more all of the time. Result? Burnt-out manager and unhappy team.
What about the confidence to engage in conflict? Again, it's human nature to want to avoid conflict. But what happens when someone in the team isn't doing what's required of them or is behaving in a way that is unacceptable, and the manager isn't confident enough to address it?
The manager bottles up their emotions, which leads to stress and overwhelm. The members of the team that are performing start wondering why they should bother when others aren't and nothing is being said... People start gossiping, and you've got the start of an unhealthy culture.
And finally, what about the confidence to prioritise oneself? Many managers are middle-aged. They often have young families, their own homes, and all of the financial obligations that come with that. If they aren't confident to prioritise themselves, they're going to constantly put work, family, finances, and others ahead of their own health and happiness needs. Result? Increasing stress and declining health.
Just like 90% of back issues would disappear if we supported people to move more, strengthen their cores, and develop muscular balance, 90% of manager stress issues would disappear if we helped all managers develop confidence.
And with happy, confident managers comes more engaged teams, better results, and more profit.
You can carry on like everyone else and firefight the symptoms or play it smart and address the root.
At Better Happy, we enable companies to level up the confidence of their managers with our highly successful three-day Optimise program.
Book a call with our team to find out more using the button 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.
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