This is the fifth blog in a series of five.
In January I heard a keynote by Jamie Taets of Keystone Group International about going “beyond the paycheck.” Her talk focused on helping us, as leaders in our organizations, understand that paying people well is not enough. To retain top talent, we need to do more. What most resonated with me were her five reasons why people leave their jobs (her information came from the American Progress Organization). The reasons were all spot on and I have seen each and every one of them in action. Using her talk as inspiration, I’ve decided to write a blog series on those five reasons and how you, as a business owner, can address them.
This week we’ll address the issue of having poorly trained managers.
We’ve all heard it before, people leave managers, not companies. And yet, despite the statistics glaring them in the face, most companies still don’t seem to get it. Poorly trained managers are an issue for many different reasons, including their inability to address the issues listed in the four previous blogs in this series. But their biggest weakness lies in the fact that they haven’t been trained on how to deal with people.
A lot of managers assume their roles because they were star performers in their previous role or they’ve been with the company the longest. They are given the title, the office, a handshake and then they’re on their own. Managing people is one of the most complicated jobs anyone can have and not preparing someone properly is not only dooming them to fail, it is all dooming their employees to be unhappy.
Most first time managers know how to do the work of their team and how to teach someone to do the work, but a great manager, a manager that employees want to work for, goes well beyond that. They need to be trained on how to hold people accountable in an effective way, how to solve the interpersonal issues that will inevitably arise, and how to motivate and inspire their employees. If you want to have an engaged and productive workforce, you need to make sure that your managers are up to snuff.
New manager training needs to be robust, ongoing, and intentional. What kind of managers do you want to have at your company? How should they handle performance issues? How should they handle people issues? How should they handle interdepartmental issues? These are the types of issues that new managers will face that they haven’t had to deal with before. They’re used to just coming in and being an individual contributor. Work gets a lot more complicated when you reach even that first level of management.
Take the time to make sure each and every manager has the knowledge, tools and resources they need to be successful before they start and you’ll see a corresponding uptick in retention.
