What’s the Key to Long-term Success? It’s the Manager!
The most important thing that owners of growing businesses can do is to develop managers! You cannot scale your business without a strong team of managers and leaders. You cannot build and sustain a strong workforce without effective managers. Jim Clifton and Jim Harter, working with the Gallup Organization, entitled their book It’s the Manager.
I humbly borrow that title from them because I could not agree more. In the Gallup research, they found that the quality of managers and team leaders is the single biggest factor in an organization’s long-term success. We simply must be developing managers!
Good Managers Encourage Work Satisfaction
Another very interesting insight I gained from Gino Wickman and Rene’ Boer (How to Be a Great Boss) is that most employees are just as interested (if not more so) in work satisfaction as they are in work-life balance. Quoting Matthew Kelly, they state that highly engaged employees “work hard…they enjoy the people they work with; they feel respected by their boss; they feel their work is contributing to customers’ lives; they find the challenge of their work matches their abilities, and they know why they go to work each day.”
After extensive interviews, Kelly discovered that highly engaged employees worked an average of nine hours more per week than their counterparts. They valued job satisfaction over work-life balance. This kind of workforce does not happen by chance. It is orchestrated by an equipped manager.
- Effectively delegate and assign work to others.
- Assess and develop their team; coach for performance.
- Track, measure, and report on progress.
- Communicate thoroughly with their team.
- Deal with employees that do not meet their expectations.
Who’s the Game Changer? It’s the Manager! The manager is the linchpin. The manager is the game changer. The manager makes the difference! Because of this, we offer businesses the manager training and coaching needed to create a high-performance organization. Contact us to learn more about how we help companies develop strong managers. And stay tuned to our blog as we write more about how we do this in the future!
