Good Managers Change Everything

“I need a new job.”

I sat across from a young man in a coffee shop who, after 10 years working for a manufacturing company, had realized that he no longer enjoyed where he worked.

Curious to hear more, I invited him to share his story.

He explained that it started out as a pretty standard job – it was a paycheque, but not much else. The work was straightforward and didn’t offer many challenges. The people were okay – he was part of a “team,” but they mostly stuck to their own work. Most days, he could pop his earbuds in when he arrived and keep them there until he punched out.

After a year of this, he was getting bored (I would be too).

He was ready to pack up and start looking for a new job when something changed.

They got a new manager.

Immediately, work felt different. This manager wasn’t holed up in her office all day – she spent time with the team and paid attention to them. She asked questions and seemed genuinely curious to learn about them and their work. 

She met with them regularly, both one-on-one and as a team. She noticed and named all that the team was doing well but also wasn’t afraid to respectfully challenge the status quo and bring up issues that could use improvement. 

She was comfortable talking openly about problems and mistakes with the team. It was never a personal attack or a game of pointing fingers, but rather a group effort to identify the root cause and possible solutions to test out. This manager sincerely believed that the team had the wisdom and capability to grow, improve, and tackle whatever came their way. 

To my young friend, this all felt a bit strange at first – he wasn’t used to being consulted or asked for his opinions at work, let alone having those opinions acted on. 

He soon found himself quite engaged by this new management style. He showed up with more energy and was eager to take on whatever new problem would come their way, and his teammates would do the same.

Before long, the earbuds came out.

The team felt connected. As they climbed out of the individual silos that had been built, they discovered how much fun it can be to work on a team where everyone is moving in the same direction.

He was no longer bored. It felt like his work mattered. It felt like he mattered.

At this point, I stopped my friend. This didn’t sound like a work environment that would be easy to walk away from. I had to ask, “What changed?”

Simple.

They got another new manager.

Eventually, the manager who had led them so well for years decided to retire and was replaced by an external person that the senior leadership team had selected. 

Sure, the new manager seemed nice enough. He would greet them in the morning on the way to his office, but that’s where he would stay for most of the day. The team stopped meeting as often, which meant they also stopped wrestling through shared problems together.

The new manager also didn’t ask a lot of questions or seek the team’s input. He seemed content to do his work and let the team do theirs. When he did pay attention, it was usually to share his frustrations about something that wasn’t going as well as he expected. Their connection with him was weak, and as a result, their connections with each other also started to weaken. 

The earbuds started going in again.

Within a year of this new manager, it felt like their team culture had reverted back to what it was nine years before, and nearly a decade of progress and intentional team building was lost.

This isn’t your story, but I bet you can relate. 

Organizational health and effectiveness are failing, and the people who have the best chance to turn the ship around are under-supported and under-resourced – set up to do little more than maintain the status quo.

The Linchpin of Healthy Organizations

If we sat down together over coffee to talk about what contributed to your best and worst work experiences, I can almost guarantee the conversation would eventually focus on your manager.

I’ve had this conversation hundreds of times, and it doesn’t matter if someone is fresh out of school in an entry-level position or if they’re a senior leader who’s near retirement. When they share their best and worst work stories, the topic of management always comes up.

There is a simple truth here, that we all know from experience:

Nothing impacts the experience of work as much as a manager.

Not only does our experience validate this concept, but so does the research:

• When it comes to employee engagement, 70% of the variance between engaged and disengaged employees ties back directly to one’s manager.
• When it comes to overall job satisfaction, a positive relationship with one’s manager is the number one contributing factor – far above compensation, benefits, or even relationships with coworkers.
• When it comes to an employee’s sense of well-being, one report found that managers have just as much of an impact on a person’s mental health as their spouse (both 69%); and even more of an impact than their doctor (51%) or therapist (41%).

As you might have guessed, all of this impact on the employee experience also has significant consequences on performance. When employees move from an average boss to a high-quality boss, productivity is shown to rise by as much as 50%. And this performance boost lasts even after the relationship is over – the employee retains 25% of any performance gains for the next year of employment.

Do we need to go on?

The Elephant in the Room

While managers like yourself have enormous potential for good, we need to address the elephant in the room right up front here.

The way we’re managing work isn’t working.

Don’t get us wrong, we believe in you, but by all accounts, the average manager is struggling to move the needle in the right direction.

Consider the following:

• 79% of employees globally are disengaged at work – that’s over 100 million people in North America alone.
• Worker stress is at an all-time high, with 71% saying work is negatively impacting their home life.
• More than half of employees report that they are relatively unproductive at work.

Here’s the problem at the core of most organizations today:

Organizational health and effectiveness are failing, and the people who have the best chance to turn the ship around are under-supported and under-resourced – set up to do little more than maintain the status quo.

The problem is real.

We can, and must, do better. 

What the Good Do Better Than the Rest

Balancing all the demands and expectations on managers’ shoulders today is easier said than done, yet there are some managers who seem to do this with an ease and mastery that escapes the rest of us. 

What are they doing differently?

To find out, we surveyed nearly 1,000 employees to identify the practices that distinguish effective managers – those who successfully drive performance, engagement, and well-being – from those who do not.

As we analyzed the responses, there were a few key themes that kept getting repeated. While the industry, sector, and culture of each organization were different, the descriptions and practices of effective managers remained remarkably stable. To ensure that what we were seeing was accurate, we compared our findings to those of other researchers and leading management thinkers.

The result is a framework that can guide you to become a better manager, regardless of your context.

We call it The Essential Five:

Essential 01 | Start with You

Being successful as a manager starts with how we show up every day. Our beliefs, mindset, and character can make or break our ability to build trust and influence with others.

Committing to personal growth and development is a critical first step to ensuring we have the impact that we desire. It flows out of a deep understanding and conviction about the type of manager we want to be, how we want to be experienced, and what we want for those we lead. Just as we attend to developing our skills and abilities, we also need to nurture our self-awareness, beliefs, and attitudes.

Essential 02 | Invest in People

As we’ve already established, people are at the core of what it means to be a manager. Our primary role is to enable others to do their best work. This requires us to build a foundation of trust and develop healthy, positive relationships with those on our team.

When we work together toward a shared purpose, our goal isn’t to simply get as much as we can from people. Instead, we focus on contributing to their growth – helping them develop both personally and professionally while they’re with us. As the saying goes, a good manager leaves people better than they found them.

Essential 03 | Build the Team

Unlike an individual contributor, a manager is responsible for leading a team of others. This level of leadership requires an entirely new set of skills and abilities.

While we often associate team-building with off-site retreats and trust falls, the reality is that building a team is a continual effort of intentionally guiding a group as they grow and mature together. When done right, your team has the potential to outperform a collection of individual contributors any day of the week.

Essential 04 | Advance the Work

Managers and employees both have one primary goal: accomplish the mission. If we miss this one thing, we miss everything.

Organizations are created around a purpose, and the only reason anyone has a job is because they add value towards achieving that purpose. A manager’s job is to create an environment that helps others to succeed in this focus. They support, resource, and equip employees with what they need to move forward. They design processes, remove hurdles, and create a culture of performance and accountability.

Essential 05 | Strengthen the Organization

As managers, it’s easy to focus all our energy on our own teams and departments. This makes sense, but if we’re not careful, it can create silos and unhealthy division across the organization.

The best managers recognize that they play a key role in the overall leadership team and have a responsibility to contribute to the bigger picture and help the organization accomplish its mission. When we become a manager, we also become a member of a new team – the management team. It is now our job to collaborate, align, and work across departments and functions to achieve a shared purpose.

The best managers recognize that they play a key role in the overall leadership team and have a responsibility to contribute to the bigger picture and help the organization accomplish its mission.

Good Is Great

These Essentials may seem overwhelming at first, especially if you’ve never really taken stock of what all falls within your realm of responsibility.

The good news is that you don’t have to master them right away. They are meant to be practiced and honed over many years as you slowly develop a style and rhythm that is authentic to who you are and uniquely suited for your context.

Much like an athlete, musician, or woodworker who learns the fundamentals and then goes off to create their own approach, these Essentials are meant to act as a catalyst that will help you create something unique and wonderful.

You see, management is a craft. It’s something you get better at by doing. It requires consistent training and refinement. With enough time, intentionality, and practice, you begin to approach a level of mastery, but it will have your unique signature on it.

We don’t want you to manage like everyone else – to crank out carbon copies of some “perfect manager.”

You get to be you. You need to be you.

Nobody is asking you to try to contort yourself into a mold that stifles your natural energy, curiosity, and talent in pursuit of some rigid picture of what “great” looks like.

In fact, we think greatness is overrated.

We have a bad habit as humans of becoming enamoured with “great” leaders and setting impossibly high standards for ourselves and others. Spend any amount of time listening to leadership speakers and authors and you’ll be ready to throw in the towel pretty quickly.

I mean, if you’re not starting your day at four in the morning with a cold plunge and a protein shake, are you even a leader?

Okay, it’s not quite that bad, but you know what we’re talking about. The pressure to be great is real.

We want to take the pressure off. Yes, your job is important, but you’re also a human, and you get to fumble your way through a bit.

You don’t need to be a perfect manager. 

You don’t even need to be a great manager. 

We just want to help you be a good manager.

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We don’t need more heroes. We don’t need rockstars. We need average people stepping up to the responsibility of management with a clear-eyed sense of their priorities and a conviction as to why their role matters.

We want the new average to be good. 

We believe good is transformational. 

We believe good is sustainable. 

We believe good is enough to silently and consistently change the landscape of our workplaces and the stories of the people who keep them going.

And we believe you can be good.

* This blog is an excerpt from our book, You Can Manage: A Practical Guide to Becoming the Manager Everyone Wants. Order now!

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