The Evolution of People Leaders: What They See & What They Miss

Our interest in people leaders and managers continues.

So much so that it was our introductory topic for a recent Chief Learning Officer conference in Boston. As we opened the discussion, we wanted to know if the top learning leaders had the same observations inside their companies as we’ve had as coaches all year.

We asked them to choose the statement below that best represented their companies:

1. Managing people has never been a more challenging role in our company.
2. Managing people is one of the strongest skills we have in our company.
3. Managing people has become a continuous learning curve that we can’t stay ahead of in our company.

Only one attendee felt the second statement fit their company. Everyone else felt statement one or three applied. So, we went a little further.

We asked them to choose the statement below that best represented their people leaders:

1. Our people leaders are set in their ways and frustrated by a broader set of expectations from us and our employees.
2. Our people leaders are inexperienced and haven’t developed the skills needed to manage how employees want to work and what they need to feel valued.
3. Our people leaders are exhausted by trying to stay aligned to demands in our business and expectations of our employees.

The start of our discussion confirmed what we’ve observed for the last few years. People leaders are under pressure and don’t have the right tools or skills to manage all the expectations coming their way.

And while we expected the responses to the opening questions, the discussion surprised us.

Even for those it’s a top pain point, supporting people leaders is not a top priority. Many of these leaders talked about it as an employee problem more than a manager’s challenge. And it validated our biggest observation which is that people leaders are begging for support, and no one has an easy answer. In fact, the pressure on people managers is getting worse.

Gallup measured the changes that people managers said they navigated last year:

• 64% said they were given additional job responsibilities, not promotions.
• 51% said they were restructuring teams.
• 42% said they were managing “budget cuts,” which often has a resource implication.

And the HR teams, for the first time ever, have the highest turnover of any functional area within a company.

Why is this such a gap?

Because companies reset a work model, and a rigor, without a manual. Senior leaders are pushing harder for results, and they don’t have a view of how that gets translated or implemented three levels below.

Remote work has done a lot of good things from reducing costs to expanding talent pools. But it takes more effort in coordination, teamwork and culture. Managers bear much of the responsibility of overcoming those challenges. We didn’t see it in a strong labor market because people just left if they didn’t like their manager. But job hopping has slowed down, and disgruntled employees are staying. Soon, we’ll all feel the frustration inside companies.

Why is it so hard to manage?

Because we introduced so much flexibility during the pandemic that managers don’t have guardrails to put any sort of team expectation back in place. Companies thought flexibility was temporary; employees thought it was permanent. And there continues to be friction to find balance.

Employees say their needs are unmet. They aren’t getting opportunities for development, and managers aren’t delivering on their expectations. And many employees have big expectations. Some are not realistic, but they still create challenging conversations. And companies have a limited view of how their managers handle them.

And why aren’t people managers catching on?

That’s the hardest part. Most people managers would say they are sitting in the middle of a perfect storm…increased demand from the company and higher expectations from employees. They’re trying! They’ve asked us for help handling conversations about:

• Limitless vacation and employees who’ve taken advantage of it.
• Requests for a sabbatical in the second year of employment.
• Employees who don’t like traffic, don’t like mornings, need fitness breaks, quiet rooms, and space away from a difficult colleague.
• Employees who go around managers if they don’t get the approval they want.
• Employees won’t don’t fly, who don’t turn on virtual cameras, who don’t answer cell phones, who don’t always seem to be working.

It’s harder than it’s ever been. Not because employees don’t have needs and expectations. But because the rules have shifted, and the interpretation of those new rules sits squarely with the people managers.

As our conversations continued at the conference, we heard more about gaps within companies and different situations managers were dealing with.

It’s handling conversations, demands and feedback. It’s knowing when to be firm and when to be lenient. And it’s being confident enough to pause and think before you respond.

It put us into coaching overdrive sharing ideas to:

• Reset teams to working as a team, not just as individuals
• Coach a manager to feel confident and stay settled in a challenging conversation
• Communicate a difference in a promotion and a development opportunity
• See, listen, and understand before you solve
• Set the difference in a general expectation and a specific request
• Adopt a conversation model to uncover the WHY underneath a skill or behavior gap
• Define parameters so exceptions don’t evolve into patterns

And while the spontaneous conversations were lively, we can do more than sketch an idea on a napkin! We’ve embraced this challenge, and we’ve developed workshops to help people managers evolve, expand and reinvent their skills. We meet them right in the middle of their experiences and responsibilities, and we coach a new way of communicating options and decisions. And I hope we’ve built confidence to help managers move through the perfect storm.

If your people managers could use a little support, we’d like to learn more about their challenges. And as we continue to talk to companies about building a better manager toolkit, we’re considering different formats which may include an open enrollment program that brings managers from different companies together. Let us know your interest by joining us on a call to explore the topic further.

We’re here when you need us!

Want a free 15-minute consultation with us to see how we can help you or your leaders? Book a call now!

When the Company Story Becomes a Financial One

When a company is up for sale, three key players take center stage: the current investor, the banker and the top executives.

And while the PE firms and the bankers know their roles well, the company leadership team is walking into a setting that’s less familiar to them. As the key spokespeople for the company, they should be the company’s best communicators. And in most settings, they are.

They bring credibility to a big prospect presentation. They add inspiration to an employee all-hands meeting. And they establish buy-in with their current investor and Board on strategies and new opportunities.

But pitching the company as a financial story is something they haven’t done often. And it’s different enough that they lose some confidence and conviction around how to do it well.

Here’s why:

It’s not the way they tell the story. – The storyline is created by the bankers. And it’s much less about solving needs for clients or inspiring a culture behind a vision. It’s focused with a critical eye on the value of the company and the potential that value has to expand in the future. It’s much less about where you’ve been and much more about proving where you could go. It’s a sum of details that have to add up. And it’s a way of positioning the company and assessing it that the founders or current leaders haven’t considered.

It’s heavy on data and details. – Most leaders don’t use slides in a lot of what they do. They’re the inspiring element of the company, so they speak from the heart, they speak from an outline or they speak off the cuff. They do not speak from heavy data slides. So, when the bankers hand over a deck for a management presentation, it’s overwhelming to them. Many leaders say they don’t see “their story” within it.

The story’s there, but it’s a different way of presenting it. It’s full of insights. It’s full of data points. It maximizes landscape with 9 or 10 points on every page. And that’s different than how a business leader has been coached to inspire and engage an audience.

And it’s more of a team effort than they’re accustomed to. – That’s a nuance that matters in communication. Leaders present together, but they stay in their own lanes and talk to their areas of responsibility. They might call it a team presentation, but it’s more five focus areas coming together. In a management presentation, they need to align to the same core messages and the same sound bites. They need to be well-aligned on handling questions so that there is a consistent response and belief across the team.

And it’s the ability to solve those three differences that brought us into the investment coaching space more than a decade ago. The role of the key players remains the same: positioning the company for a successful exit from one investor to another. Our role is an added addition: helping the communicators, as individuals and a team, find their confidence in a tougher setting with a different lens on content.

We do it with a three-step process that focuses on: the talk track, the communicators and the team.

The talk track doesn’t mean the deck or the positioning. That’s the bankers’ role. Our work focuses on helping each leader find their voice in a storyline that is less familiar to them. While the slides are dense to leaders, it’s common place in a sell position. These decks are used to position companies as pre-reads and as documentation to set the story without the leaders. So, the slides won’t change. But we can help leaders consider how their voice comes through and how to work with headlines and foot lines to avoid getting bogged down in the details and losing their train of thought or their audience as a result of it.

The seasoned communicators need some support in thinking through how they want to position themselves along with the story. Most of this work is on personal style and leveraging great communication skills to be clear, concise and compelling. It’s a high-pressure setting. So, each leader wants feedback and a few coaching adjustments to be sure they bring their “A” game to the setting.

And finally, the team. Learning to manage key messages and sound bites in a messaging document is a new skill for most leadership teams. It’s pulling everything into a few big concepts that help them consider how to make points repeatable. And it’s a rehearsal that helps them see the flow of the talk track, their ability to tether back to key points and appear as an aligned team in a high-stake setting.

We’re the added addition that allows the bankers and current investors to stay focused on attracting buyers while we stay focused on helping the leadership team find their voice in presenting a financial storyline. So, whether your role is exiting a company in your portfolio or building the financial storyline to pitch it to other investors, we can ensure that the communicators you’re counting on bring their best to the opportunity.

Call us when you need us.

 

Want a free 15-minute consultation with us to see how we can help you or your leaders? Book a call now!