Human resource leaders often focus on empowering employees but overlook the criticality of engaging and empowering managers. Being an effective manager can be tough, regardless of the size of an organization. From maintaining budgets to consoling, motivating, and even disciplining the employees, the work and role of a manager can be diverse in a company.
How HR can Communicate Business Goals to Managers and Empower Them to Drive Teams’ Engagement?
A Gallup report shows that managers can account for up to 70% of the variance in an employee’s engagement level in the US. Managers hold a lot of responsibility on their shoulders and Human Resource has to ensure that each employee feels encouraged and buoyed by the employer.
When managers are empowered, they pass on the same motivation to their team members, driving strong business results. So, what can HR leaders do to truly empower their managers to drive engagement in the team?
By communicating the organizational goals and strategy to the managers and explaining the ‘why’ behind each goal, HRs can make them feel connected to the organization. If managers will feel empowered and connected to the organization, they will be able to pass that zeal to their teams. This means that employees will start exhibiting the behavior necessary to succeed and achieve organizational goals.
HR is the driving force behind manager or leadership empowerment. Let’s look at how HR can impact manager empowerment and development to drive engagement in teams and organizational success.
1. Leadership Training and Development Programs
Managers have a crucial role in encouraging and empowering their teams. The more confident your managers will be with taking charge, the more engaged the rest of the employees will be. Most of the employees feel motivated by just praise from their managers. For this reason, it becomes essential for HR to look at how managers can be trained and developed into the best version of themselves.
The process might begin with offering training and development opportunities to the leaders, encouraging them to upgrade their skills. HR can play a major role in impacting managerial development by celebrating the managers’ strengths and identifying where they can perform better.
The process of developing managers must begin before developing the employees. HR must create a unique system to identify future leaders and provide opportunities for them to grow leadership skills through these training and development programs.
2. Promotions & Succession Planning
Organizations often promote people having advanced technical skills in leadership roles. But technical skills don’t necessarily translate into exceptional leadership skills. HR must be aware of the severe impacts of poor leadership skills.
When people get promoted to senior leadership roles, it’s the responsibility of HR to ensure they are trained and supported to be able to do justice with their new position. There should be an effective system of promotion, ensuring leaders are onboarded and supported through multiple initiatives including training programs, coaching, and mentoring.
HR should be involved in the promotion process and must carefully examine the skills and strengths of the manager to ensure the right candidate gets the promotion to a senior role. Along with promotions based on technical skills, HR should also consider soft skills, conflict resolution, communication, and change management skills.
The succession planning process must be clear to ensure there are leaders who can step up if someone in the leadership role is retiring or get promoted to higher levels in the business hierarchy. Effective managers can motivate teams and drive employee engagement in the workplace without the coordination of HR.
3. Developing Managers with an Employee-centric Approach
HR should ensure that managers at all levels must follow a people-centric leadership model that is facilitated by the HR themselves. It’s the responsibility of an HR to ensure people in the organization know the basics of effective leadership. This may be in the form of established documentation or wording around expected behaviors of the leaders. This will set clear expectations in the organization. An employee-centric approach also involves creating effective strategies for hiring, developing the interpersonal skills of leaders, and retaining or managing teams.
4. Helping Managers to Adopt Team-based Approach
Comprehensive management is not just about performance reviews and workflows, it’s about motivating teams to do their best work. Your managers will keep teams happy through good leadership skills. This comes back to training and developing programs, effective promotion, and hiring the right people in leadership roles.
Managers must be provided with the right set of tools to work on their weaknesses and develop their team’s strengths. HR can help managers empower individual teams by equipping them with the right process of training, coaching, and mentoring within the teams. This also involves training leaders on how to identify potential leaders of the future.
Promoting the culture of appreciation and recognition can also help teams to reunite and work harder to achieve a common goal. Employee appreciation tools such as Proko can help an managers and their teams to appreciate co-workers for a job well them and promote this culture throughout the organization.
5. Promote One-on-One Meetings Between Managers and Employees
HR should encourage one-on-one meetings between managers and employees. These meetings can be an opportunity to spend time with employees offering them an opportunity to discuss their struggles, wins, areas of improvement, and personalities. Taking time from their busy schedule, managers show employees that they are valued, and their opinions are heard.
Such sessions allow managers to identify employee strengths and weaknesses and areas of weaknesses so they can set the employee for success in the future. Such meetings give managers a great opportunity to establish trust and good bonding with the employee. Employees can feel motivated and often show signs of improvement after such sessions.
6. The collaboration of HR and Managers
When it comes to organizational success, HR needs to identify what managerial roles affect business strategy. HR will be able to find individuals who need training or coaching to execute effective strategies. When managers create strategies, HR needs to be across these strategies to document them so that they can effectively communicate these strategies to new employees joining the team. HR must collaborate and work alongside managers or business leaders to ensure processes are followed while meeting the expectations.
The Bottom Line
HR can help in empowering and engaging managers by giving them the right set of tools and guidance to improve their confidence and competence. In addition, HR would be benefitted from rethinking learning and developing formats and delivering that learning within the context of work. If managers feel empowered, they can motivate and engage their teams. A positive environment can lead to better business results and organizational growth.
