Yes, Managers Matter – Are Yours Ready For This Year’s Challenges?

The turning of the new year is a prime opportunity to reset expectations and goals for employees, realigning everyone behind your strategic objectives. Are your managers ready for this challenge?

Late last month, Matt Monge wrote about the importance of getting your leaders behind your important initiatives, saying:

We can talk all we want about having an engaged workplace (or being more efficient, or having better training, or whatever), and we can even really want an engaged workplace (or those other things); but until we—meaning you, me, and every other manager or leader—start doing things as individual leaders to create that environment with our teams, it’s not going to happen across the organization.”

Employees leave because of bad managers

Indeed, every leader in your organization (whether they bear the title of “manager” or not) must be behind your efforts to create a culture and mission with which employees want to engage.

Why? Results of a survey conducted by MSW Research and Dale Carnegie Training and cited in Forbes showed:

The attitude and actions of the immediate supervisor can enhance employee engagement or can create an atmosphere where an employee becomes disengaged. In addition, employees said that believing in the ability of senior leadership to take their input, lead the company in the right direction and openly communicate the state of the organization is key in driving engagement.”

Managers matter. Check out this list of top 10 reasons your top talent will leave. Notice each starts with “You failed…”– meaning you as the manager failed to unleash everything they had to offer.

Yes, employees can and do choose to leave for personal reasons unrelated to work, but most often, managers are the primary factor in employee decisions to stay or leave. (For the upside perspective, read these tips for hanging onto your best and brightest talent.)

Are your managers on board with your major initiatives?

You can find more from Derek Irvine on his Recognize This! blog.