Why is managing leaders different?
You trust your managers to simultaneously achieve desired business results while motivating employees and organizing them to do the same. They should have a firm grasp of the company’s mission and are trusted to take on extra responsibilities and accountabilities to achieve it. To get into a management role, they’ve usually displayed any combination of competency, ambition and the ability to multitask. As such, managing a manager is different from managing an employee.
Unlike employees who typically look to management for guidance, managers generally have more freedom to make decisions and drive business outcomes. As a management leader, you must earn the trust and respect of your leadership team to get the best out of them. That means having crystal clear expectations, exceptional communication skills and the ability to see the bigger picture.
Managing managers is all about careful planning and tactics. Start with a clear mission and vision to align leaders and provide a solid framework of policies and procedures to work within. Get to know each manager’s strengths and weaknesses so you can delegate targets to the leader most qualified to achieve them. Instead of micromanaging, create a workplace environment that celebrates innovation, productivity and open communication.
Lastly, set an example of what you want to see. Model how you expect managers to treat employees by maintaining a consistent focus on working together toward company goals and providing unwavering support along the way.
How to manage managers
Let’s take an in-depth look at a holistic leadership strategy that emphasizes structure and communication while nurturing growth and collaboration.
1. Company culture buy-in
The first step to managing leaders is defining company culture. Start with your mission, vision and value statements—high-level overviews of how you want your company to impact the world and the ideological driving forces behind it.
If you’re just starting out, hire a leadership team based on your mission and values. Incorporate messaging into job ads so you attract like-minded people, and ensure it’s woven into interview questions, job descriptions, training material and incentive programs.
For established leaders implementing core values and vision and mission statements, involve your existing leadership team. Use surveys, focus groups and one-on-one meetings to workshop your vision and values, taking current culture, strengths and areas of improvement. Even if you have a good idea of how you want to define company culture, involving your leadership team increases their investment in it.
It’s impossible to overstate how important it is for your leadership team to buy into company culture —so they can translate it into inspiration for their teams.
2. Foster a healthy work environment
While focusing on productivity and achievement is essential, hard work must be balanced with a healthy attitude. It’s easy to hire a team of managers ready to work tirelessly toward company goals, even if it compromises their health and work-life balance . However, this isn’t sustainable because it leads to burnout for most, resulting in low retention rates for your business.
Hiring managers and onboarding them into your company culture are huge investments and shouldn’t be taken likely. It might be tempting to churn through leaders in search of the most productive and resilient, but that’s an expensive and risky strategy. You’re better off hiring competent managers and making sure they work the number of hours they’re supposed to, take regular vacations, and don’t work more than they can handle.
3. Understand unique managerial ambitions
Taking time to get to know each leader is one of the best investments of your time you can make. From the moment you make first contact, get to know them as deeply as possible. Delve into their aspirations, personal growth objectives, perceived strengths and weaknesses and skill sets. Showing an interest in them builds trust and demonstrates your aptitude as a people leader, in addition to revealing the best ways to motivate that individual.
For example, if a manager tells you they’re keen to understand the profit and loss account, let them shadow you twice a week while you work on it. Or, a manager might tell you that their passion is for people, in which case you could place them in charge of the company’s mentorship program. This level of personalization fosters loyalty, commitment and buy-in because you’re demonstrating your loyalty and commitment to them.
As managers evolve, maintain the same level of interest in their aspirations and find ways to shape their roles around them. It’s one of the best ways to ensure high-performers stay invested and excited in their roles.
4. Normalize management realities
When hiring a new manager or promoting an employee, make sure they’re aware of common management realities in your company. Delegation, conflict resolution, time management, resource allocation and burnout are examples.
What you want is a culture of support, collaboration and encouragement — not one in which established managers wield power or superiority over new managers. One of the underlining principles of effectively managing managers is ensuring they work alongside each other instead of against each other in pursuit of common goals.
5. Delegate effectively
Being able to assign tasks to the workers best able to perform them is a core competency of all leaders. Senior managers must set the example by never hoarding tasks to themselves and delegating them to people who are confident and have the necessary skills. If you feel none of your managers can effectively perform certain tasks, it might be a sign that you need to invest in training courses.
6. Harness the power of feedback
Gathering employee feedback about managers is a highly effective way to measure performance and celebrate achievements. Leaders who go the extra mile for their teams are resilient people who deserve to hear how important and appreciated their work is. For many, hearing positive feedback about the real ways they’ve helped people improve their lives is profoundly motivating.
For someone who works long hours, is constantly available to answer people’s questions and always has targets front and center—feeling appreciated can stave off emotional burnout .
7. Encourage mentorship and succession planning
As any business leader knows, nothing is guaranteed to last. Your most revered manager might leave to go with their spouse to another country or start a new career path entirely. That’s why it’s crucial that you have a strategy in place for mentorship and succession planning . Encourage high-performing managers to mentor employees they see potential in and pass down their knowledge to them, creating a pipeline of culture-fitting future leaders.
8. Offer learning and development opportunities
Aside from salary, learning and development opportunities are many employees’ favorite workplace benefits, especially for managers. People in leadership roles often work hard to continually improve their knowledge and skills so they’re at the top of their game.
Support their ambitions by sending them to training courses or workshops related to their role or a skill they want to build. Alternatively, offer to pay upfront for a formal qualification in return for a three-year contract at the company. The impact investing in an employee’s future can have on loyalty and retention is unparalleled.
9. Provide ongoing support for managers
In addition to fostering a culture of open communication and support, where people can speak freely and receive sympathy or guidance, it’s important to offer personal support. Ensure managers know you’re willing to lend a listening ear and provide personal advice if they need it.
10. Lead from the top
Ultimately, senior leaders shape an organization’s ethos and how people behave within that framework. Every action and decision is a blueprint for managers, which is, in turn, a blueprint for employees. By thoughtfully designing company culture and embodying those principles, values and standards, you have the best chance of leading a team that fulfills your vision.
Knowing how to manage managers means a commitment to transparency, open communication and cooperation as you work toward common goals. By setting the example, you pave the way for managers to emphatically align corporate culture and use that passion to inspire the workforce and achieve company goals.
