If Your Managers Lack These 5 Skills, Your Company’s in Trouble

January 9, 2019

If Your Managers Lack These 5 Skills, Your Company’s in Trouble

Toby Graham Managers

When a company succeeds, credit typically goes to executive leadership. Founders, presidents, and CEOs receive accolades for their strategic visions, for their abilities to inspire and motivate, and ultimately for their organizations’ performance.

Of course, leaders don’t get all the credit. Every now and then, on-the-ground employees earn recognition as well—for providing an extraordinary customer experience, for instance, or going above and beyond a monthly sales goal.

But when something goes wrong, it’s neither the C-suite or the frontline workforce who bears the brunt of the blame. When customers feel frustrated, when executives notice lackluster organizational outcomes, or when members of a team face internal conflict, they all follow the same procedure:

They demand to speak to the manager.

The Many Roles and Responsibilities of Management

As the people tasked with turning executive vision into employee action, managers are the ones accountable for what does or doesn’t happen in the workplace. That includes workforce compliance. Your managers are responsible for whether your policies and programs live or die.

At the same time, managers need to coordinate resources, engage and develop the employees on their teams, discipline (and sometimes terminate) bad actors and underperformers, minimize risk and exposure for their organizations, and do it all in a timely and cost-effective manner that—somehow—always puts the customer first.

In other words, management is a tough job. We’re talking about a role that demands people skills, math skills, leadership skills—basically, every set of abilities and competencies a company needs to succeed, bundled up in a single position. Not everyone has what it takes.

Do your managers possess the skills they need to both engage their teams and protect your organization? To help you find out, we’ve distilled the myriad roles and responsibilities of management into 5 essential areas.

1. Basic Compliance and Management Skills

Being a manager not only means having numerous day-to-day responsibilities, but also navigating everyday risk. Through their actions and inactions, managers can either protect their organizations from worst-case scenarios, or expose the entire workforce to incidents of harassment, security breaches, legal conflicts, regulatory action, and other perils and uncertainty. As such, the first skill of any effective manager is knowing and following basic information around employee rights and employer responsibilities.

To determine if your managers have this skill, consider the following:

Do your managers understand their roles, the skills required, and their relationships to their teams?
Are they up to speed on the employment laws and regulations that impact both their teams and the company as a whole?
Do they see how they contribute to creating a workplace that’s free from harassment and discrimination?
Can they successfully onboard and offboard members of their team?

2. Hiring

Team-building is another essential element of management. By effectively finding and retaining the right people for their teams, a manager ensures the present and continued success of their organization’s workforce, culture, and brand. After all, without good employees, a company isn’t worth much more than its equipment, intellectual property, and real estate.

To determine if your managers have this skill, consider the following:

Do your managers understand both the best practices around hiring top performers as well as their obligations to hiring legally?
Can they conduct a great interview that balances both legal requirements along with probing into areas that determine both skills and fit?

3. Productivity

Employee engagement studies show a clear link between poor management and a nation of “checked out” employees. Buck this trend by making sure your managers understand how to keep their teams engaged and productive.

To determine if your managers have this skill, consider the following:

Do your managers have coaching skills that empower their teams to excel in their roles?
Do they understand the building blocks of employee engagement?
Can they run productive and effective team meetings?

4. Teamwork

There’s a strong correlation between engaged employees and employees whose manager helps them set priorities. Make sure your managers have strong skills in this area—because even the most talented employees will flounder without support and motivation.

To determine if your managers have this skill, consider the following:

Do your managers set effective goals for their team members?
Can they help their team members prioritize their work to efficiently reach their goals?

5. Discipline & Termination

Discipline and termination is more than a willingness to say, “you’re fired.” Wrongful termination awards cost an average of $134,000 and can take up to 3 years to resolve. It’s essential you manage this process appropriately to mitigate risk for your company and treat the separating employee with respect during their exit.

To determine if your managers have this skill, consider the following:

Do your managers understand the process and requirements for terminating employees?
Do they have the skills to confront difficult employee behavior?
Are they documenting discussions around performance history and discipline procedure to ensure your organization has a defendable position should any litigation pop up?

Suffice it to say that if your managers lack one or more of these 5 skills, your organization needs to make a change—stat. Over the next few weeks, we’ll explore each of the areas mentioned above in greater depth, offering further considerations and best practices for manager development.

But if you’re currently facing a management crisis and you’d rather not wait, Compli can help you and your managers right now. With Compligo, our automated workforce platform, you can…

automatically assign and administer training, so each manager understands what’s expected of them during every aspect of the employee lifecycle;
provide your managers access to a library of the HR forms, reports, guidelines, and tools they need to manage their teams effectively;
and
help managers track compliance of their team against individual programs to help instill the values of their company, and ensure all employees stay on top of their program requirements.

Toby Graham

Toby manages the marketing communications team here at Compli. She's on a quest to help people tell clear, fun stories that their audience can relate to. She's a HUGE sugar junkie...and usually starts wandering the halls looking for cookies around 3pm daily.

→ Toby Graham

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