Maximizing Managerial Effectiveness: Strategies For Success

As HR leaders, you would have seen the impact of good and bad managers. Skilled managers enhance employee productivity and healthy business functioning. The not-so-good ones often mess up the company's performance.

If employees form your organization, their managers guide the organizational culture. That's why their effectiveness has always been a primary concern for companies.

But what makes up manager effectiveness? Let's take a look.

What is manager effectiveness?

It is a set of skills that help managers manage their teams better. It strives to derive the best results from minimum input. Managerial effectiveness involves:

1. Keeping your employees motivated
2. Maintaining proper communication channels
3. Appreciating and rewarding timely

Several factors affect a manager's effectiveness:

1. Manager's intelligence, experience, creativity, and enthusiasm form their personality
2. Organizational structure, mission, vision, ethics, and values affect how a manager operates and performs
3. Manager's entrepreneurial drive and determination to get work done
4. Company's work environment impacts the level of freedom a manager gets to achieve organizational goals

How manager effectiveness differs from manager efficiency?

Although many companies use the two terms interchangeably, they are different. Here's how.

A specific set of skills make up an effective manager. Below are the abilities that matter.

Characteristics of an effective manager

1. Leadership Skills

Tyrants don't get work done; managers who lead by example do. Effective managers work with their teams and show them how it is done. They understand that project deadlines and company regulations aren't meant just for the employees but for the manager too.

2. Communication Skills

The clearer the communication, the better the manager's effectiveness. Effective managers maintain an open communication work environment. It begins with setting clear expectations for their employees, being transparent and honest, connecting individually to gather their genuine feedback, and working on their criticism. AI-enabled chatbots like Amber come in handy in helping managers connect with each employee on a personal level.

3. Decision-making skills

More experience and deeper knowledge of their work polish managers' decision-making skills. Effective managers are creative and adept at taking quick decisions that get the desired results.

4. Interpersonal skills

No manager or team works in a silo. Every manager is required to connect with other department heads to smooth business functioning. An effective manager maintains interpersonal relationships with other managers and leaders.

5. Time management skills

Managers' effectiveness is mapped from their ability to achieve business targets within the set time frame. An effective manager utilizes time well, keeps time-oriented personal and team targets, and maps them regularly.

Importance of manager effectiveness

Effective management makes a company successful. And manager effectiveness is an integral part of that strategy. Up to 15% of employees leave your company in the absence of managerial support and due to poor management style.

Leaders like you need to focus on building manager effectiveness to reap its many benefits, like:

1. Lower employee turnover

Effective managers communicate with their employees regularly and gather genuine feedback from their teams. They ensure their employees are heard on time and don't look out for other opportunities. Such managers enjoy a lower staff turnover.

2. Lower stress and absenteeism

Ineffective employee management often leads to stress and employee burnout. Such employees ruin the work environment, affect team morale, and are prone to quitting, thus causing a ripple effect on the organization. Effective managers can prevent such scenarios.

3. Higher employee productivity

Clear guidance and set expectations from an effective manager boost the team's productivity. An effective manager's team grows together and is motivated to perform better.

There are many ways to boost manager effectiveness. Let's look at the top five.

How to improve manager effectiveness?

You can improve manager effectiveness in the following ways.

1. Continuous learning and development

Professional development opportunities and training programs can help enhance your managers' effectiveness. It polishes their existing skillset to suit the organizational needs, prepares them for managing their teams better, and supports their future growth.

2. Encourage employee feedback

Be a good listener, or let Amber be your Chief Listening Officer. Encourage your employees to share their genuine feedback regularly to identify what's stopping them from realizing their full potential. Being oblivious to what's brewing within your team adversely affects business functioning. Make your employees comfortable in highlighting any issues they face.

3. Foster a positive organizational culture

Effective managers build and maintain a solid company culture. Often open, honest, and transparent communication sets the foundation but is not enough to forge a positive organizational culture. You need to:

• Establish the company's core values in your daily business functioning
• Set clear goals and appreciate when your employee achieves them
• Encourage camaraderie and boost morale among your employees through team-building activities
• Enforce flexibility and inclusion in your daily operations
• Provide growth and learning opportunities
• Empathize and show compassion to gain their trust

4. Provide adequate resources and support

Your employees need more than a manager who listens to perform well. Provide requisite resources and support them to perform their duties. This includes organizing training and development sessions, simple guidance, or taking the lead in decision-making when needed.

5. Promoting open communication

Open communication with your employees can give you deep insights about the challenges they face at workplace or in their roles. As a manager, you learn about what motivates or frustrates them and mend your ways accordingly.

Measuring the success of these measures is critical. Here's how you can measure manager effectiveness.

How to measure manager effectiveness?

1. Feedback from employees

This is a great barometer to measure manager effectiveness. Employees' job satisfaction and happiness scores are directly influenced by the manager. Up to 3.5% of employees leave due to a lack of recognition and appreciation from their manager. Their mood scores and feedback through pulse, eNPS, or anonymous surveys can give you actionable insights on manager effectiveness.

Plus, mapping employee experience can churn out valuable data that tells the true story of what's brewing in a team.

2. Performance evaluation

Functional and behavioral diversity in an organization makes it difficult to measure a manager's effectiveness. That's why it needs to be tailor-made to business needs and conducted regularly.

Look for these traits while evaluating a manager's effectiveness:

• The ability to delegate tasks without prejudice
• Team management skills
• Ability to inspire and motivate employees to perform better
• Transparent communication and actions
• Good listening skills
• Quick and proactive decision making
• Be a coach than a boss

3. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

As leaders, you can set performance benchmarks to map manager effectiveness. The goals must align with your company goals and be specific, measurable, achievable, results-oriented, and time-bound (SMART).

Besides, you can set the below factors as KPIs:

• Interdepartmental collaboration and relationships
• Work standards and environment prevalent in the department
• Record of timely business goal achievement
• Retention rate and individual employee performance
• Motivation level of the team to undertake challenging projects
• Level of employee engagement and absenteeism

4. Top performer resignation rate

If it happens more than once, it can be a cause of worry for leaders like you. Top performers leave when they are not happy working with your company. But up to 57% of employees quit when they are unhappy with their manager.

Calculate the number of top performers' resignation rates to know if the manager might be ineffective. You can use this formula to evaluate this rate:

Top performer resignation rate = 

Total number of top performers who quit

The average number of top performers                                                 

5. Coaching equity

As a manager becomes a coach than a boss, affinity bias often seeps in. That means men tend to hire more men, and women hire more women. As a leader, you can map this by identifying if a manager spends less time with underrepresented employee groups within their team. For example, analyze the time a manager spends on training each reporting employee and then break it down according to gender or other diversity-oriented factors.

6. Staff utilization rate

A skilled manager understands employee strengths and strives to utilize them in the best possible way. Such managers try to involve all team members to avoid getting some employees more stressed and burnt out than others. Calculating the total employee hours/days allotted to a project and the number of hours/days served helps foresee the proper utilization of all staff. The variance shows whether the team is overutilized or underutilized.

For example, if you had allotted 100 person days to a project and the team worked for 150 person days, there is a +50% variance indicating that employees in that team are putting in more days than allotted. This could suggest that the manager is either not employing the right people for the tasks or is unable to manage complex projects.

Conclusion

Inadequate support from their manager or poor management style are among the most prominent reasons for employee exits. Employees are your most critical resource, and their managers nurture those assets. That's why keeping a tab on manager effectiveness is as crucial for leaders.