The Best Investment Organizations Can Make Right Now

It’s simple. Invest in your supervisors, team leads, managers and leaders… whatever title you give them. Invest in building leaders.

I’m not suggesting you spend thousands or millions of dollars on training, but it’s time to reframe and invest in those roles because they are critical to your teams’ engagement and retention. Maintaining or increasing engagement and improving retention rates will impact your bottom line and customer satisfaction.

Where I see gaps

What I’ve often seen for supervisor training or management development is a focus on the “what” – what the role needs to do.  Activities like managing processes, setting goals, writing reviews, creating deliverables, meeting SLAs and achieving business targets are the focus. Organizations are usually good at providing training on these operational activities.

On the people leadership side, new supervisors often receive training (what they need to do and how to do it) and access to self-directed online learning resources from Udemy, LinkedIn Learning or another vendor. These are good things to offer, but they’re not enough when building leaders.

They’re not enough because they don’t focus on the “why and how” of leading people, the importance of customized leadership approaches, or the complexity of managing diverse team thinking. We need to inspire creativity and innovation, not just follow processes. We need to elevate the usage of our human skills, which Josh Bersin refers to as our PowerSkills.

Leading in today’s environment is not about command and control or a one-size-fits-all approach. It is much more about influence, collaboration and customized strategies. It’s about finding ways to get the best from each individual to make the team stronger and, ultimately, the organization more successful.

What can organizations do to improve?

Redefine the role

Look at what’s in your job profiles about leading teams. Are all of the statements about processes and measurements?

Consider instead:

• Emphasizing building individual capabilities of team members
• Increasing employee engagement and retention for the team
• Providing clear career progression messages to team members

Emphasize PowerSkills

As we consider efforts for hiring internally or externally, we need to rethink the requirements. What skills and experiences are most important for leadership? 

Are you willing to overlook PowerSkills (often referred to as soft skills) for someone’s technical or functional capabilities? The impact of doing this probably depends on whether the role requires human interaction. If it does, and your candidate doesn’t check the boxes on the power skills needed for success in the job, you may be setting the individual and the organization up for failure. These skills are developed over many years and complex experiences.

Teaching someone a new technical, functional, or industry skill may be easier than power skills.

Below is a list of power skills that Josh Bersin identified in 2019. Whether you agree that this is the correct list or not, you probably agree that you can’t just send someone to a class on followership or curiosity. They will need to build that over time. Ensure you know what PowerSkills are required for the jobs in your organization.

You can read more about Josh Bersin’s perspectives on Power Skills here.

Rethink how performance is measured and what is rewarded when building leaders

• What do you value in your managers? 
• Does your performance process evaluate the impact they have on their teams? 
• Are they held accountable for employee engagement or career progression?

Many performance systems I have seen don’t evaluate separately between operational business goals (revenue, profitability, quality, SLAs, etc.) and managerial impact. Sometimes, there’s a goal tied to attrition, but not always.

If you believe, as I do, that managers play a crucial role in employee engagement and retention, organizations need to include team management in evaluating performance. In addition, rewards also need to be influenced not just by meeting specific business goals but also by the people-related goals you set. If someone hits all the hard metrics, but morale is low and attrition is high on the team, this is a performance issue. The reward message should align with this.

Provide coaching on a real-time basis when building leaders

Here’s where I think there’s a significant opportunity that few organizations, if any, are employing. 

Create a capability in your organization that allows supervisors to receive real-time coaching on working with their teams, handling conflict, encouraging growth, etc. Some may think that HR Business Partners can perform this role, and I agree that they usually have the capability and desire to do it. The issue is capacity. HR Business Partners often support organizations with many team leads and managers and have responsibilities beyond managerial coaching.

What if you had a function dedicated to helping supervisors, team leads and managers succeed in their people-related responsibilities? This scope’s ROI would be seen quickly in higher engagement, team performance and lower attrition.

People are often one of the most significant costs to an organization. 

Are you managing that investment properly, or is it time to reinvest in your strategies?

About Melissa Carson

After working in HR for several high-performing organizations, including Accenture and EPAM, for 25+ years, Melissa Carson founded her business in 2019. She offers people strategy development and alignment, leadership development and coaching and HR advisory services. As a leadership endurance coach, her clients range from small non-profits to scaling technology companies, all with a common goal of sustainable high performance for themselves, their leaders and their organizations. She graduated from the College of William and Mary (BA) and Marymount University (MA) and holds the following professional certifications: GPHR, SPHR, SHRM-SCP and ICF Certified Coach (ACC).  She has served as an adjunct instructor for Wilmington University’s Human Resource Management program and as a board member for the YWCA of Delaware and the Philadelphia Society of People and Strategy, where she still volunteers.