To make matters worse, as firms worldwide invest significant amounts of time and money in developing managers to provide more feedback and development conversations, manager quality is actually stagnating. In fact, almost half of the managers we surveyed say they don't have the confidence to develop the skills employees need today. Not only that, but as managers' job expectations continue to increase, the time they have available to develop their staff declines. Fifty-five percent of managers we surveyed considered performance management too time-consuming. Not surprisingly, when we share these data points with our HR executive clients, they often tear into an energetic monologue around the role of the manager in developing teams and employees that generally boils down to "Well, that's the job." And, of course, the best business minds have understood for decades that people management takes time and attention. Here's how the 1957 Harvard Business Review article titled "An Uneasy Look at Performance Appraisal" describes the expectation around formal performance management: "There is one unavoidable cost: the manager must spend considerably more time in implementing a [performance management] program.... It is not unusual to take a couple of days to work through the initial establishment of responsibilities and goals with each individual. And a periodic appraisal may require several hours rather than the typical 20 minutes." This expectation of manager coaching (still valid today) is compounded when we consider that with rare exceptions, people managers also have their own individual work to perform. So how do today's managers cope with all these growing and shifting demands, and what do the most successful managers today do differently?
THE RESEARCH
As leaders in Gartner's Human Resources Research & Advisory practice, we experienced firsthand the growing interest in the topic of manager development among our clients. Manager development has always been hard, so at first we were skeptical that there was anything new to say. We became convinced that management really was shifting, however, when a series of events affected our own roles. It was early 2017, and we woke up one morning to an email announcing the sale of our previous firm, CEB, to Gartner. It was an acquisition that no one at the firm had anticipated, and the news meant our company would double in size. The first few days after the acquisition was announced were filled with ambiguity—and some anxiety among employees, including us. As managers, we immediately found it harder to navigate conversations. We each faced discussions with employees who were emotional and worried that their roles might change. Despite feeling similarly uncertain ourselves, we both wanted to be a steady presence for our teams. Navigating our own doubts and fears while assuaging the concerns of team members put our management skills to the test.
At the same time, we reflected on how the acquisition affected our coaching responsibilities. For Jaime's part, he went from managing several teams to managing a large business that required a new set of collaboration and communication skills. For Sari's, she also began managing more diverse employees throughout different continents with a variety of backgrounds, skill profiles, and career aspirations.
Managing employees effectively really 'is' harder in today's work landscape. Our next step was to test the conventional wisdom of what it means to be a manager. The central question in our research was, What are the best managers doing to develop employees in today's workplace?
After assembling the research, we embarked on an extensive study. We needed a large, global, diverse data set to uncover insights that had the promise of transcending industry, geography, and manager tenure. As part of that, we launched surveys of more than nine thousand employees and managers worldwide, representing eighteen different functions working in twenty-five industries in six different regions.
Our survey goal was to assess manager approaches to employee development (for example, frequency and quality of these coaching interactions) and to determine their impact on employee performance. We define performance at Gartner as the outcomes employees achieve by doing their individual tasks and assignments, by contributing to others' work, and by using the contributions of others. We call this measure enterprise contribution.
Part of the objective for the surveys was to collect as much quantitative and qualitative information as we could from diverse perspectives. We collected:
* manager perspectives on the work environment, including how they spend their time, their spans of control, and their development interactions;
* employee perspectives on their own development and the effectiveness of their manager across common development activities;
* business leader perspectives (from more than two hundred public and private sector organizations) on organizational characteristics, budgets and priorities, performance management strategies, expectations and development support for managers.
