Can Managers Become Great Leaders?
How The Best Leaders May Already Work Inside Your Organization
Strong leadership is one of the best assets to any organization, facilitating employee productivity and morale. When people often quit due to weak management, bolstering your team with managers coached in leadership is an investment that can pay back dividends.
How the best leaders might be inside your organization already
Managers make or break an organization. With high-quality managers, employee production and morale increase dramatically, but a lousy manager can bring productivity to a screeching halt or even chase good employees away. Google attempted to prove that managers don’t matter beyond being a necessary evil to oversee workplace productivity, using manager performance ratings and manager feedback from annual employee surveys. The result?
Teams with great managers had better productivity and higher morale.
The study resulted in a log of ten behaviors that the best managers so great:
- Strong coaching skills
- Empowers their team without micromanagement
- Are concerned for the success and well-being of the team and work to create an inclusive environment
- Results-oriented and productive
- Strong communication skills, both listening and speaking
- Discusses team performance to support career development
- Shows clear vision and strategy for the team
- Has the relevant technical skills to advise the team
- Collaborative
- Decisiveness
In other words, the best managers have strong leadership skills that help them to guide their teams to success. They play the role of coach to ensure everything gets done while facilitating the growth and development of their teams.
This is often done by focusing on the individual needs of team members in conjunction with the needs of the team and the job. Strong leaders and coaches can unlock their team’s potential while assisting as needed.
High-quality coaching managers are among an organization’s most significant assets, and the best leaders may already be hiding in plain sight, working quietly behind the scenes to ensure the success of their teams. By looking for the abovementioned traits in your management team, you may find your organization’s best leaders and spot those who need support to reach their fullest potential.
How to use leadership coaching to turn your managers into great leaders
The old adage that people quit bosses, not jobs, seems to ring true. According to a 2019 Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) survey, several concerning statistics come to light:
- An estimated $23 billion has been lost by US companies because of culture-caused turnover.
- 25% of US employees dread going to work each day.
- 57% of US employees believe workplace managers require additional training to improve management skills.
- A staggering 84% of US employees believe poorly trained managers make their jobs unnecessarily more demanding and stressful.
If your management team isn’t performing as well as you would like, there’s good news: With leadership coaching, they can learn the behaviors and habits needed to improve these skills and boost performance and productivity. Leadership Choice offers leadership training to managers to increase leadership effectiveness.
In our Connecting for Leaders program, we teach managers five essential skills to transform managers into great leaders:
- Connecting With People: Emphasizes communication skills for effectiveness, teaches conflict resolution, and improves team dynamics.
- Delegation: Improves time management and efficiency while strategically delegating tasks to cater to team members’ performance and talent.
- Performance Coaching: Teaches managers how to provide team members productive performance feedback to facilitate improvement and growth of team members
- Influencing: Teaches elements of charisma, including confidence in expressing ideas while overcoming resistance.
- Inspiring Trust & Confidence: Teaches leaders to create their own leadership brand to facilitate team confidence and respect.
