Most managers will also have a job to do themselves aside from managing their team. Not to mention own their development plans and be an effective team player for their manager.

Being a highly effective manager is not an easy task that’s for sure, it requires a set of skills that often need to be learned, as few people are “born” exceptional people managers.

Of course not! Back to the real world for a moment. We all know that this isn’t true. Many managers struggle. They struggle to effectively manage their time and workload alongside their team responsibilities. They struggle to make the leap from driving their own performance to delivering performance through others. They also struggle to keep up to date with the expectations of them from an HR perspective.

But that’s okay, because as standard every organisation invests heavily into training, upskilling, coaching and developing their new managers to help them become excellent leaders. And then invests equally in continuing to support and coach their existing managers throughout their careers...

Don’t they?

Managers account for a 70% variance in Employee Engagement (source: Gallup)

Research in the US by Gallup suggests that approximately 1 in 10 people are capable of being an excellent manager – capable of driving success through their team for the greater good of their organisation.

If you can only really count on 10% of your current managerial workforce to be doing the right things and motivated to drive their teams to succeed, then it should be a priority to focus some attention on the 90% that clearly need support.

This isn’t a thing just for new hires externally. What about your internal promotions? What support is given to colleagues that are new to people management? What mix of mentoring, buddy systems, formal/online training is available immediately upon a new manager starting work? How do you mix the three “E’s” for greatest impact? (Exposure, Experience and Education).

Linked to the above, if you have an intranet with HR pages bursting with guides, policies and reference materials, go and check the visitor stats. How many page views have there been in the last 6 months? Have there been any spikes? If so why? Was it linked to the launch of the biannual performance review process? What behaviour can you learn from the data to give you an idea of when your managers need information, and what information they need?

When are the peaks in inbound enquiries to the first line HR support team? For what reasons? These are all signals about managers lacking capability and/or having low confidence. Or maybe just holes in knowledge across your business.

Would it not be better to get on the front foot and think about what material would be useful to managers, and at what point?

Do you run a talent assessment process? Great – share relevant “how-to” guides directly with responsible managers when they need to read them.

Are you aware of managers that need to recruit? Great – drip feed content to them at the most appropriate time to help guide and coach them through the recruiting process.

Your people manager community are instrumental to your organisation staying in business. As it stands you are probably leaving them to their own devices to “learn” how to manage people any number of ways – many of which will be ineffective and will be leading to employee engagement problems.

Brought to you by Foresight, a business that works with HR leaders to automate the exchange of information between HR and business managers, furnishing their teams with high-quality data points about real people challenges in their business; then nudging managers to act in a way HR need them to, to drive better business performance.