The Root Cause of Manager Woes

Managers have been called the “unsung heroes” of the business world. They’re “the quietly diligent ones who sharpen, modify and turn a conceptual high-level strategy into something truly brilliant,” the dean of a top business school declared. 

Managers are also struggling in ways far beyond what most executives realize. They often keep it to themselves, feeling they have no one to turn to. “The loneliest place of all may be middle management,” a study found. With pressures coming at them from both above and below within the corporate hierarchy, managers constantly have to “manage up” as well as down and feel they have nowhere to turn to for support. 

Researchers examined data from more than 320,000 employees across a range of companies. They zeroed in on those whose engagement and commitment scores were in the bottom 5%. Reporting on their results in The Harvard Business Review, the researchers said the “unhappiest” workers are most commonly mid-level managers with five to 10 years’ tenure.

The Top Issue - Loneliness

Being a manager is extremely stressful and lonely. As research from the University of Western Sydney recently showed, “the loneliest place of all may be middle management,” where pressures are coming in from both above and below them in the corporate hierarchy. It affects not just their work relationships but their personal ones as well. “Long hours and stress are ultimately taking a toll on middle managers’ relationships with their partners, family and friends, but they often keep it to themselves and put on a brave face to the world,” the author of the study explained.

At Imperative, our work with all sorts of organizations consistently shows us that a lonely manager is a struggling manager. Their loneliness and unhappiness make it tougher to provide all the empathy and compassion their teams need from them. These negative feelings can also close them off to new ideas for enacting change, since just getting through each day as it is feels difficult enough.

It’s not just a problem for managers. They create a “drag on the organization,” lowering profit margins, the researchers report in HBR. Managers also play a major role in attraction and retention. So if they’re feeling down or even miserable, their reports are less likely to stay. “One in two employees have left a job to get away from a manager,” according to Gallup.

Management has been revolutionized

Managers’ tough work as the backbone of an organization has long been a reality of business operations. But now, things are tougher than ever.

Today’s managers face a slew of new challenges. They need to embrace their workers as “whole people” and provide psychological safety and motivation. They need to make sure their teams are advancing in skill development to prepare for the future of work. They need to pour energy into keeping their employees fulfilled. And much more.

“Many of us grew up with this mental model of what a manager is from our parents, which was, ‘Oh, they just give the orders,” Corina Kolbe, VP of Learning & Development at Zillow, shared. “Now, you're a mentor, you’re a coach, you have to set vision and strategy and give feedback. There’s just so many things for managers to do, and that’s complex.”

The Covid-19 pandemic made all those tasks even harder. With tens of millions of employees suddenly working from home, managers had to act as “a source of information, a model of organizational culture, a counselor, even an IT assistant,” Human Resource Executive reported. “As more organizations build remote or hybrid work into their long-term strategies, the very role of the manager is being redefined.”

Everyone across an organization felt the brunt of the pandemic. But “much of the strain of interpreting the uncertainty for worried staff is falling to managers, at a time when their own jobs, health, families, and financial security are under threat,” a Financial Times columnist wrote. “Managers are also taking the operational decisions on which national, not just corporate, welfare depends.”

As though all that wasn’t enough, the important new calls for diversity and inclusion added another dimension to managers’ roster of responsibilities. Some experts on inclusive leadership have called for managers to “be a first line of defense by conducting regular check-ins with employees to monitor whether the work environment is free from discrimination (both intentional and unintentional) and help ensure that it is by enforcing zero-tolerance or progressive discipline policies.”

Managers need new tools

Of course, executives are also overwhelmed, and can’t be expected to drop other responsibilities in order to provide managers with everything they need. The good news is that there are tricks of the trade managers can learn that will vastly improve their workflow and their work lives.

Unfortunately, traditional learning and development doesn’t solve this. Instructor-led courses and online training programs aren’t designed to help people manage people. They don’t provide emotional and psychological support. And they aren’t tailored to each individual manager’s unique challenges.

But there’s a solution: empowering managers to help each other.

Neuroscience shows that intentional efforts to build relationships can have profound effects. As the Harvard Business Review reported, “those who connected with others and helped them with their projects not only earned the respect and trust of their peers but were also more productive themselves.” And the book The Business of Friendship by Shasta Nelson added these relationships are strongest when they include three critical factors: consistency, vulnerability, and positivity.

THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO MANAGER-TO-MANAGER COACHING

To learn more about how leading companies like Zillow, Boston Scientific, and Accolade are having breakthrough results by empowering managers to lean on each other for support and to develop skills, download the Definitive Guide to Manager-to-Manager Coaching.