We know those in leadership roles deal with stress and challenges just like any worker. In fact, Health and Safety Executive proposed in 2020 that 12.8 million days were lost due to stress, depression, and anxiety.
Managers will often have to face unpredictable situations and test their leadership skills, but there’s also a great deal of challenges they face every day. With the right resources and training, you can help your managers thrive.
Daily Challenges of Leadership
- Avoiding burnout. Burnout of staff can be one of the biggest factors of turnover, which can then translate to being understaffed. Two key training areas to address burnout in managers are stress management and how to delegate workload and responsibilities. While they are leaders, they can still feel pressure, and it’s important that they understand how to manage these emotions.
- Instilling motivation. It can be difficult to motivate others when leadership themselves are struggling to do so. Keeping in mind the purpose of the organization, how do their choices impact the team? To instill this mentality, develop your managers’ coaching skills through communication and encouraging feedback from employees.
- Hiring the right talent. Determining who is the right fit for the company and culture can weigh on the mind of leaders, and they might feel the weight of the company on their shoulders. Help determine the mandatory or flexible attributes about the position. Consider training for soft skills and see what areas your training program can help them be the best fit – remember no one will be 100% prepared for any role despite their qualifications.
- Uncomfortable conversations. This can be letting an employee go, dealing with a harassment issue amongst employees or even just providing feedback. Help your managers prepare before they are going to have an awkward conversation. Give them the tools for these conversations by providing training on difficult conversations, setting expectations, providing feedback, and giving them opportunities to practice.
- Budgeting. The most obvious stress about budgeting is making budget cuts, and this can be a difficult topic for managers to navigate. They need to not only be organized but also be able to communicate effectively with their teams and stakeholders in the organization. Managers have to be clear and concise with budget strategies and maintain transparency and address concerns employees might have.
With so much on their plates, managers need solutions that can be implemented into the workday. Microlearning has become one of the more desirable methods of training due to its concise format and how it can be easily accessed from multiple platforms when it is convenient for managers and employees.
Learn more on the benefits of using microlearning to train on soft skills in our ebook, “Developing Employee Soft Skills: Gain Maximum ROI with Microlearning”.
How do we overcome these daily obstacles?
Communication with the team
There does not need to be a façade of leaders appearing perfect 24/7. Encourage leadership that they should have honest, transparent conversations about issues that are on their mind. This can build a strong relationship between managers and employees.
Listen
Conversely, leadership should be the ears to listen to others. Train managers on active listening and coaching, so they can ask questions that help lead employees to a solution can help resolve issues they might be dealing with. Our active listening competency guide says, “the great thing about active listening, is that a key element is active thinking.” To listen effectively you must understand listening to understand vs listening to respond.
Lead With Purpose
To create motivation within your organization you must act with meaning –the answer to “why” shouldn’t be “because I said so.” Align your goals with that of the organization’s and connect back each assignment or project so that the meaning is always present. Ensure that managers are explaining the “why” behind tasks they are assigning and how they are a contributor to the mission and goal of the organization.
Practice Delegation
Don’t let all the workload fall onto the same leaders, communicate with the team on their bandwidth to see if they would like to take on new tasks that could develop into career opportunities. Keep in mind an employee’s strengths and passions when delegating work, maintain a clear communication channel, and allow the freedom to fail. These will all help your managers to be seen as a leader and help their employees develop their skills and grow in their careers.
It is inevitable managers will have a lot of challenges on their plate, and you cannot predict what will come up, but consistently developing their skills and providing the right resources can help them succeed. For more information on developing future leaders, read our infographic. https://www.bizlibrary.com/resources/infographic/how-to-start-developing-your-next-generation-leaders/
