My wife works part time for a large healthcare company that recently restructured their management team. Like many companies facing reductions in workforce, they’ve adopted lean management structures in hopes of doing more with less. Now her manager has nearly 100 direct reports (twice as much as before), while still being expected to reach the same outcomes. But as we all know, that math doesn’t add up. Most reputable research shows that companies actually tend to see their productivity, retention, and overall employee experience decline when manager workloads increase. HBR cites research concluding “overwork and the resulting stress can lead to all sorts of health problems, [which is ] terrible for a company’s bottom line, showing up as absenteeism, turnover, and rising health insurance costs.
As a recent article in Fortune notes, “Layoffs and hiring freezes have left many managers overseeing larger teams and shouldering heavier workloads. This increased strain makes it challenging for them to offer the support and guidance their teams need to thrive.” This fully undermines a manager’s core responsibility, which is to coach and develop their team. So what can be done in this era of increasing pressure on managers to do more with less?
Let’s face it, a manager’s job is really labor intensive, requiring a high level of cognitive thinking and emotional intelligence. In order for managers to have the bandwidth to make good judgement calls, they need more capacity. Here’s 3 ways managers might claw back some of their capacity, despite increased demands:
More Focused Time
Usually, the first thing to go when stress arrives is clarity. Studies show that not only are we unable to think straight, but we tend to make worse decisions when under stress. For those particularly difficult managerial responsibilities such as providing employee feedback, communicating clear expectations, or supporting assigning appropriate work, managers need their best thinking available. Of course, in order to find time to focus on the work that only a manager can provide, capacity will have to be freed up somewhere else.
Opportunities to Build Skill
Most managers aren’t actually professionally trained to be good managers, they just happened to be really strong individual performers. What if managers spent more time learning and practicing the skills that ultimately lead to strong team performance? It would likely not only lead to stronger outcomes, but also less stress on the manager as a result.
An AI companion.
The key question managers need to ask themselves is, what is mine to do? Some work can only be done by the manager, but there’s a lot of other stuff that can be done elsewhere (think compliance, route tasks, things that don’t require a manager’s judgement call). Right now, most AI tools focus on the cost and time saving aspects of work being done, and that’s useful for managers (think using AI to help you craft agendas or emails). The next frontier for managers though will be in AI personalization. Imagine a personal coach who can help you improve your practice as a manager. Speaking of which…
So what’s next?
One way that our company, ManagerEQ is supporting managers is by creating tools and communities to support capacity building. Given the dire circumstances for many companies, this might be the game-changer managers need. If you’re interested in learning more about how we can support you or your organization, visit our site and let’s connect.
