The 6 S's of Managerial Effectiveness

Over the past decade, Gallup has articulated two of the most sobering statistics as it relates to employee engagement and productivity: 1) That managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement and 2) That companies fail to choose the candidate with the right talent for the job 82% of the time! Yikes. This means that companies are not investing enough in managerial filtering, assessing, and preparing potential talents for this crucial role nor are they investing enough in developing and course correcting managerial competencies once selection has occurred.

Gallup finds that great managers have the following talents:

• They motivate every single employee to take action and engage employees with a compelling mission and vision.
• They have the assertiveness to drive outcomes and the ability to overcome adversity and resistance.
• They create a culture of clear accountability.
• They build relationships that create trust, open dialogue, and full transparency.
• They make decisions based on productivity, not politics.

Importantly, Gallup defines talent as a natural way of thinking, feeling, or acting that can be productively applied. It is through this frame that they can state unequivocally that most people leaders lack the raw talent for the function. Through this lens, many things must change to enhance managerial effectiveness which is the only sure-fire path to enhancing employee experience. This is where Intent Consulting's proprietary 6 S model to maximizing managerial effectiveness comes into play.

The six S's are Selecting, Sourcing, Serving, Supporting, Succeeding, and Succession. Let's dig deeper into each S.

Selecting

To dramatically increase the hit rate as it relates to managerial selection - recruiters need to be filtering and assessing for the right talents. This is easier for external recruits than for internal because for internal people who have never managed, their answers to questions such as: "how do you motivate every single employee to take action?" will be theoretical. This is why the best companies prepare their potential people managers by placing them in real-world scenarios, pairing them with talented manager mentors, and even providing low stakes managerial opportunities in the form of stretch assignments before assigning them to lead their own teams. Importantly, such programs require significant investment in time, resources, and focus. These are table stakes in the effort to elevate employee engagement and productivity, and as such, if you don't currently have such an initiative for all managers regardless of role and function - it's fundamental to start here!

Sourcing

One of the first things a new manager needs to learn how to do well is to source talent for their teams. Because they have little experience with interviewing and have yet to determine the DNA they value most in prospective teammates, time must be spent to help them make these crucial determinations. Once they have a better idea of not only the skills and behaviors necessary for their open roles, they also must be supported in effectively onboarding their new joiners. This is because, 64% of employees are likely to leave a new job within their first year after having a negative onboarding experience. HR can only do so much here - the rubber meets the road in how the new manager prepares their new joiner for success.

New managers must learn how to appropriately influence the job description and talent pipelining processes, ask the kinds of questions to determine their team DNA, and balance standardized onboarding with individualizing the experience for new joiners. The minimum standard is to provide managers with a proven onboarding framework designed to enhance trust, clarify expectations, and align preferred working styles.

Serving

Now, we have arrived at the manager's day job. This is where the new manager's leadership brand will be born and where it is essential to train and develop managers to practice their authority in the right way. They will need to learn how to successfully navigate between the three levels of supporting - leading, coaching, and managing. Leading involves learning the science of influencing motivation, engagement, and productivity. Coaching is about increasing other's self-awareness of their talents, strengths, blind spots, and potential derailing behaviors to maximize how they show up day to day. Managing focuses on aligning expectations and enhancing employees' task orientation and output quality and timeliness.

In this way managers learn the different approaches to serving and supporting those in their charge. This is not only relevant to new managers but equally crucial to managers at every level of experience. Everyone benefits from continuous learning and development of skills such as situational management, high performance coaching, and establishing true connections. The result of this investment is a consistent level of managerial effectiveness that elevates the employee experience.

Supporting

With the basic capabilities in place, managers can lean into the work of ensuring employees experience the best version of themselves within the holistic ecosystem of the organization. Still, managers exist in the highest-pressure space within the organization - between upper management demands and serving their employees' needs. Therefore, further skill development is needed in this stage, which usually occurs around the 6–12 month mark in role. This is the moment to introduce skill building around stakeholder management, prioritization, conflict resolution, and negotiating trade-offs.

• Stakeholder management: We support managers by reminding them that an important aspect of their success is understanding and aligning their work with where the priorities of the organization are and may be headed. This is multidirectional work that builds on their employee orientation by creating space for gaining credibility and closeness with senior stakeholders as well.
• Prioritization: Managers at all levels can become easily overwhelmed by the demands of their calendars, responding to nonstop email and other communication channels, organizing and supervising the work of their teams, mandated corporate trainings, etc. We support them by helping them see their work through the lens of urgency and importance as well as impact and effort. This allows them to truly be acting on what's most important and impactful at any given time.
• Conflict resolution: Each of us has a default conflict style that emerges when challenged. Managers need to learn where they naturally defer to in terms of level of assertiveness versus openness to cooperate and once identified how to increase their levels of assertiveness and cooperation until collaboration becomes the natural approach to managing conflict.
• Negotiating trade-offs: As assertiveness increases, we support managers by training them how to avoid zero-sum outcomes in favor of win-wins and paradoxical solutions that transform conflict into innovation. When managers operate with this enhanced skill set, more gets done with less resistance.

Succeeding

It is in an organization's favor to help as many managers succeed as team managers as possible. This idea runs counter to the current hierarchical design of corporate structures today - which has been polluted by the idea of vitality curves where only a select talented few within any group are expected to succeed at the expense of the majority. This "A" player theory is fundamentally wrong at best and lazy at worst as it overemphasizes disproportionate rewards for the minority versus elevating the many in service of the organization's overall mission.

Success can therefore be reframed by giving managers a say in how they are measured and what rewards they can expect to receive upon performing well against shared objectives. Too often managers are rewarded as individual contributors when they should be incentivized by how well they drive team success, how many people they develop and promote, and how much impact they are able to deliver for customers.

Innovation is the ultimate reward for effective management. This is why it is important to also measure how much new momentum is being generated by the managerial core. This can come in the form of process simplification, value extracted, customer insight generated, and game changing ideas brought forth. Succeeding is the stage where we reap the rewards from emphasizing and focusing on the previous stages of the 6 S model.

Succession

When you operate from within the 6 S framework, you begin to have a comprehensive end-to-end view of where each manager is on their journey. You can easily map and link needs for new managerial selection with managers who are ready now to be sourced for leadership succession. Being prepared to level up is a function of matriculation and consistent delivery through the stages of Serving, Supporting, and Succeeding. It should be apparent that this model is designed to promote far more from within than poaching talent externally - which allows us to pay off the investment made in the robust fortification of managerial effectiveness.

The three elements of effective succession are Mapping, Mentoring, and Motivating. Mapping has been described above and is about assigning a development value to each manager such as ready now, ready soon, or ready later. For potentials in the ready soon designation - they should be provided mentors at higher levels in the organization who can help them understand the elevated expectations but also advise them on the best ways to prepare themselves to be ready for these opportunities when they come available. For managers in the ready now category, we must keep them motivated and highly engaged by giving them opportunities to experience some of what they can expect to gain at the next level.

This process also provides visibility to everyone in the organization on what behaviors and examples of success lead to being considered for elevated levels of responsibility. It conveys the seriousness of the role of management and removes the egotistical and me oriented actors from being selected in favor of servant leaders who understand that their role is to uplift the organization.

If you are interested in discussing how to transform managerial effectiveness in your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to us!