Three Things Managers Lack Today That Will Hurt Them Tomorrow

We know being a people manager is a constant shuffle between people and priorities. Each day is a question of whether to focus on the strategic goals of growing the skills of your team and the business or the tactical objectives. For many managers, coaching their people and proactively giving feedback is what they love most about managing others, but it can take a back seat to running reports, projecting performance, and the firefighting that inevitably comes with a growing business. However, the benefits of being able to better coach your people are countless and 72% of employees say their performance would improve if they got more feedback.

Constructive feedback is the vehicle by which your teammembers grow and become better professionals. That said, many managers lack thesethree components to fulfill this critical facet of people management:

• Managers lack the time to provide feedback and coaching. Today, most managers are functioning in player-coach roles, with responsibilities for growing the business and their people. Key components of people management often get pushed to the side when priorities compete for a manager’s time.
• Recommendation: Hold fast to your 1:1 cadence with your team members. A 1:1 is invaluable time between a manager and an employee that offers an opportunity to build trust, check in on the employee, and raise awareness around any areas where the employee may need the manager to remove barriers or further support the employee. This is dedicated time for you as a manager to tune into your employee and offer managerial coaching and feedback and is important to building a healthy employee-employer relationship.
  
• Managers lack the coaching habit that must be cultivated over time. Giving feedback, both positive and constructive, is a craft that must be honed. Developing a coaching muscle takes just as much devotion as training for a half marathon in order to condition one’s approach and mindset.
• Recommendation: At Peoplelogic.ai, we’re big fans of Michael Bungay Stanier’s The Coaching Habit. Stanier offers up an easily accessible approach to coaching that allows this function of people management to become a regular, informal part of your day so managers and their teams can work less hard and have more impact.
  
• Managers lack the data to consistently provide timely, objective feedback. Oftentimes, feedback to an employee can feel subjective and not grounded in fact. For feedback to be constructive, it must be based on data and coupled with actionable recommendations.
• Recommendation: Leverage the systems and tools you have in place to formulate actionable insights about performance. Your CRM can assist with objective metrics tracking, but you must learn how to absorb the information so that feedback can be as constructive as possible. Your engineering systems also serve up metrics and performance data about your team. Leverage this information to better coach your people and identify areas of opportunity. Peoplelogic.ai pulls data from the tools you use every day to formulate the types of insights we reference here. We believe feedback shouldn’t be a guessing game, and our recommendations are real-time so you can provide your team members with the coaching and feedback they need almost instantly.

Setting expectations and having honest conversations about performance are key to employee engagement and just good business practice. As a manager, there are always things to be done and the constant distractions always get in the way. When it comes to coaching and feedback, making time, creating a habit, and leading with data and fact are imperative to your team’s success and their engagement in the organization. Peoplelogic.ai can help shore up some of these gaps and always puts you on your front foot. We believe when you have engaged team members who are growing through your feedback and coaching, your team will perform better and you’ll win more.

About Peoplelogic.ai 

Peoplelogic.ai gives managers actionable recommendations and insights that help spot and correct problems on your team and between the other teams you work with, before you miss your goals. Get started for free.