Worldwide, the cost of poor management and lost productivity from not engaged or actively disengaged employees is $8.8 trillion, or 9% of global GDP.
Changing how people are managed is perhaps the easiest way to boost productivity within organizations.
Yet, the majority of managers receive little feedback on how effectively they manage their team. Less than half of U.S. employees (42%) report having the opportunity to formally provide feedback to their manager, and fewer than one in four (24%) have formally rated their manager’s performance. Managers are not getting much help from their peers either, with only about a third (36%) of managers saying they receive feedback from their peers as part of a formal feedback process.
Many managers admit they have room to grow. Four in 10 acknowledge they have not yet achieved an advanced or expert level of proficiency when it comes to engaging their team or managing performance. While six in 10 managers say they are not advanced or expert at developing employees and helping them create career paths.
To help managers foster highly productive teams, Gallup conducted a study comparing how managers think they are currently leading their team versus how employees saythey are being managed.
The study used a nationally representative U.S. sample of 2,729 managers and 12,710 individual contributors. Each group assessed how they are managing their team or how they are being managed based on a list of 20 managerial responsibilities.
Strengths
Where are managers most effective?
The behaviors that both managers and employees rated highest are baseline expectations of management. These behaviors are more transactional and straightforward to deliver. While being responsive, approachable, informed and providing resources are important, these behaviors have the lowest correlations to employee engagement observed in the study, indicating they are less likely to elevate performance than other key behaviors.
The exception is high-quality feedback, a more refined managerial skill highly correlated with employee engagement.
Despite relatively high scores on these six behaviors, significant room for improvement remains. There is a wide difference between manager and individual contributor ratings on some fundamentals, including a 21-percentage-point gap in responsiveness to calls and messages and a 19-point gap in high-quality feedback.
Managers should not take these relative strengths for granted and must continue to sharpen them because they are the foundation of effective communication, support and strong working relationships.
Known Weaknesses
Where do managers struggle the most (and know it)?
The known weaknesses, behaviors both individual contributors and managers see as areas for improvement, focus on effective coaching. Meaningful feedback, motivation, removing barriers to performance and discussing strengths involve conversations that go beyond basic communication of facts and minimum responsibilities. And they all involve a forward-looking approach: “How do we get better?”
These known weaknesses are very highly correlated with employee engagement, demonstrating that managers are not only falling short, but these behaviors are among the most critical to increasing productivity, retention and customer engagement.
The lowest rated behavior was “meaningful feedback in the last week.” This behavior combines both quality (“meaningful”) and frequency (“in the last week”) of feedback. We call these ongoing, high-quality conversations the “coaching habit,” and it is among the best predictors of employee engagement Gallup has ever studied.
