What managers want: starting points that most organizations can do now

Managers have a tough job. No matter where they are in the organization, they continuously and simultaneously have a dual focus that not enough organizations adequately address and recognize. Managers must be both great at their individual jobs and responsibilities while also developing those who report to them plus creating an environment from a team perspective that celebrates differences and encourages collaboration and cross-functionality. 

And as we round out 2024 and head into 2025, what do managers want more than anything else?

Well, there are a few things that come to mind:

• Most managers became managers because it was the only way to get promoted in order to make more money. But if we asked them if they enjoyed it - or wanted to do it moving forward - I believe we’d see a ton of them say, “Actually, no.” Before we promote people into management, let’s start to ask them if they want to be managers. 
  
  
• In my experience, people that are great individual contributors are not always great managers, and vice versa. Managing others is its own skill set that is separate from the skill set needed to do their work as an individual contributor. More and more organizations are undergoing changes in the way they set out career pathways for their employees to include both manager tracks and individual contributor tracks for roles and departments.

• Managers’ roles include both overseeing and doing at various points during any given work day. And many of them need to make decisions during that period based off of the events and context they have at that moment in time. We need to collectively give managers more grace to be able to fail and learn. We tend to think of failure as this big scary word. And in business, what this does to managers is it makes them think that they need to cover up their mistakes, lie, and even continue down a spiraling of bad behavior because they want to do anything but fail. This behavior is not the actual behavior that any healthy organization should want to see from managers, yet many organizations also don’t embrace failure in any way. Let’s give managers the room to make mistakes and learn from them, and to help pull them back up when needed. 
• Managers also need to know that their managers have their backs. Success can not come from fear-based management, yet managers are put in a position of feeling isolated more often than they should. 
• Let’s embrace failure while also giving managers a net and a hand on the shoulder when they need it. More growth happens for both the manager and the organization when there is trust and support.

• Over the past few years specifically, managers have continually been asked to add more and more and more to their plates. Many have no balance in their lives between work and life because in order to perform well, they have needed to shoulder the work and figure out how best to get through it. We know humans don’t work well when we are overwhelmed and inundated. In fact, our brains make worse decisions when our work becomes this way. We need to start asking managers what is manageable from a work perspective for them to be able to do their best work. When managers are able to do their best work, they support their teams more, and overall the bulk of people actually outperform those that are stressed and stretched thin. 
  
  
• And, when stressed and stretched thin, teams make costly mistakes. So organizations can either pay for costly mistakes that were avoidable with proper workforce planning, or they can mitigate those costs and even boost their revenues by providing the appropriate level of work for teams and managers. While some may look at this as killing the bottom line, the real business savvy among us will know that providing adequate workloads actually bolsters and increases the bottom line for any organization.

Let’s reimagine how we support the people who keep our teams running strong! 💪✨

- Anessa Fike