2/7-Refresh Management Styles (1/2)
Towards a Co-created Signature
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Management Perception Gap: Only 56% of employees feel executives care about their well-being, compared to 91% of executives who think they do, highlighting the urgent need for self-awareness and alignment in management practices.
The Cost of Poor Management: Disengaged employees cost $8.8 trillion globally, emphasizing the need for better management styles.
Renew Management Styles: Personalized, co-created management practices build trust, engagement, and well-being.
Understanding the Misconception Gap
According to Deloitte, 56% of employees think their company’s executives care about their wellbeing, while 91% of the C-suite think their employees believe they care about it.
This misconception is one among many others that executives and managers have about their teams. Poor employee engagement is a logical outcome with such a discrepancy.
However, some parts of the workforce are more concerned and should be the priority: managers.
Gallup found that while manager engagement is low globally, it's still higher than that of non-managers’ engagement.
Given these insights, it’s not a surprise to discover that companies fail to choose the candidate with the right talent for the job 82% of the time.
While hiring criteria should be based on talent rather than simply rewarding promotions, this highlights the need to raise current managers’ awareness of their practices
Most of the time, to face this issue, the solutions are about providing reliable tools, resources, methods, or training programs to learn to sustain themselves first. However, is the root cause addressed in this process?
Exploring the Misconception Root Cause
Managers might be vaguely aware of the impact of their management style on their teams through passing comments about mood shifts, behavioral changes, or a lack of motivation.
However, they might have forgotten that to sustain their teams, they need to sustain themselves first.
Well-being starts at the top and can’t extend to the entire workforce if managers do not prioritize their own well-being first.
According to these previous insights, providing a bunch of solutions seems insufficient. So maybe new questions should be explored.
Today, I suggest getting at the root cause and focusing solely on managers with this question:
Instead of labeling good or bad practices, why not try to learn from them to reinvent them?
1- Raise Awareness of Management Practices
Executives' misconceptions are more important than they could think. Indeed, Gallup did a study of 2,729 managers and 12,710 individual contributors, comparing managers' and employees' perceptions of established management practices.
This current state of management about employee versus manager perspectives highlighted specific strengths, weaknesses, and misalignments, based on a list of 20 managerial responsibilities.
Some "blind spots" — areas where managers feel overconfident — have been identified in delivering recognition and providing frequent feedback.
These blind spots are directly linked to the lack of employee engagement and finally result directly from the "known weaknesses" — The areas that managers struggle with the most (and know it).
We can notice that these areas of improvement are not technical but emotional-related skills, knowledge, and abilities.
Although practices and roadmaps are shared to support managers in their journey, they will always be insufficient if they lack self-awareness.
2- Analyse Management Practices
Self-awareness has known various definitions over the past years, so Dr Tasha Eurish created an overarching definition broadening two types of self-awareness: internal and external self-awareness.
Internal self-awareness is based on our perceptions of ourselves in various dimensions, and external self-awareness is based on how people perceive us based on the same dimensions.
Balancing both internal and external self-awareness is key to achieving greater alignment in overall self-awareness.
As both employees and managers are mostly aware of the areas of improvement needed to better work together but don’t have the "how," why not try to make this work collectively?
Every team is composed of a diversity of skills, knowledge, and abilities that should be explored first, for better cohesion, and to make self-awareness more accurate for management practices improvement.
It’s a win-win experience for both parties, and the company can only gain in many dimensions.
Let’s remember that the worldwide cost of poor management and lost productivity from not engaged or actively disengaged employees is $8.8 trillion, or 9% of global GDP.
3- Reshape Management Style
As work practices are evolving, management practices also need to evolve. Hybrid work is changing the way we used to work and is deploying unprecedented requests and needs.
The management styles that used to be effective need to be enriched with new value propositions to better fit with the current era.
AI can now replace many tasks previously performed by employees, and this is just the beginning. It’s up to executives to decide where they want to stand by showing their values in their decision-making process.
Some might choose to replace employees with AI to save costs and gain more productivity, while others will try to maintain their workforce by rejecting AI.
Why not try to find a balance and make news available resources at the service of the whole company purposefully?
However, relying on AI to address existing management issues is not a sustainable solution. Fixing the root cause first is how you could either fix your current management issues to better design the coming journey with AI as support to improve this initiative.
Co-Create Purposefully
Refresh management styles approach can be based upon B2C practices. In the never-ending demanding world we’re living in, attention is hard to get for businesses. Loyalty mostly disappeared due to endless competitive offers, services, and products.
Similarly, it’s what is happening in managers overwhelmed by never-ending requests. It became harder for their teams to get attention, so engagement and loyalty disappeared.
However, the way some businesses still manage to stand out by co-creating with their community is how managers could also reverse the trend by co-creating with their teams in the improvement of their management practices.
If perceptions differ from executives to their teams, they still have one thing in common: well-being as a priority.
Deloitte pointed out that 68% of employees and 81% of the C-suite say that improving their well-being is more important than advancing their careers.
Let’s thrive in that direction, purposefully, and create lasting impact with creative practices.
Improve Your Practices With a Design Thinking Approach
The future of management is personalized management — that has nothing to do with micromanagement.
Navigate different management styles that fit the best, not with your whole team but individually.
Designing your management style by navigating different management styles with a personalized approach to your profile and your teams is a way forward to improve everyone’s well-being at work one day and one step at a time.
The more you know your team as an individual, the better you can move forward with clear communication, whatever the situation, because everyone will be confident enough to express themselves— yet according to the boundaries settled defining your personalized management.
Striking a balance between understanding your team members as individuals and knowing yourself better is the key to creating a personalized management style using a design thinking approach that evolves and iterates over time.
Create Lasting Impact
By doing so, you innovate and make your team the catalyst for growth and improvement of practices for unique management and unique managers.
By contributing to improving your common journey, you can only reinforce trust. And what better foundation than trust to foster engagement and well-being?
Quitting the binary good or bad practices label is how you create a lasting impact not only on your team's work but also on your team's employee experience.
You allow them to write a new chapter by your side by being fully involved in the reinvention of your practices and the definition of management.