These are the signs you are failing as a manager

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The job of the manager has become unmanageable.

That’s the stark conclusion Gartner information technology researchers made after looking at research on today’s increasingly flatter organizations, where the average manager’s number of direct reports has increased by 2.8 times over the last six years. All of that came when normal operational difficulties were accentuated by the issues of the pandemic, remote work and return-to-office wrangles.

“Gartner research has found that managers today are accountable for 51 per cent more responsibilities than they can effectively manage – and yet they remain the load-bearing pillars of an organization. They carry the weight of leader expectations at the top, while responding to employee expectations at the base,” Gartner’s Swagatam Basu, Atrijit Das, Vitorio Bretas and Jonah Shepp wrote in Harvard Business Review.

They believe managers are starting to buckle under the pressure, with 54 per cent of managers reporting they are suffering from work-induced stress or fatigue and 44 per cent struggling to provide personalized support to their direct reports. Their analysis suggest nearly half of managers (48 per cent) are at risk of failure, given their performance inconsistency and lack of confidence in their ability to meet the future.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, they found challenges such as inability to prioritize, lack of technical skills, unprecedented changes and coaching ineffectiveness are not the top indicators of manager failure. Instead, these four issues are the top predictors:

• When managers lack self-awareness: Managers who are unaware of their own strengths and areas needing development are nearly three times more likely to fail as those who possess this self-awareness.
• Insufficient empathy: Gartner research has found that a lack of team empathy increases the risk of manager failure by 3.7 times. Part of that stems from a lack of upward empathy shown by employees toward their manager but the bulk rests with a failure in downward empathy by managers. “The value of manager-led empathy cannot be overstated, and it has become even more important in recent years,” they state.
• When manager-employee relationships are unproductive: Only 47 per cent of employees say they derive valuable outcomes from interactions with their managers. Managers whose direct reports can’t derive value from their interactions are 2.7 times more likely to fail.
• When employees’ work doesn’t align with goals: Employees are overburdened as well, of course; by Gartner’s count, employees experienced five times as many changes in 2022 as in 2016. “When hit with disruptions, managers are 42 per cent more likely to prioritize providing immediate work support over aligning work to broader organizational or individual career goals. However, when managers do not align their employees’ work with both organizational and career goals, they are 2.4 times as likely to fail,” the Gartner researchers say.

If those four failures seem a little elevated or hard to pinpoint in your own managerial style, they are worth pondering. While doing that also consider these 10 more pungent derailers supplied by Denver consultant Gregg Vanourek on his website:

• Avoidance: Avoiding difficult tasks, situations or conflicts.
• Burnout: Becoming run-down and feeling exhausted, often because of a lack of self-care.
• Bottleneck: Feeling you must make all decisions or taking on too much work yourself, causing delays.
• Delegation: Not entrusting tasks to others sufficiently, leading to reduced motivation.
• Feedback: Not providing feedback well or often enough or not soliciting it enough or receiving it well.
• Insecurity: Lacking confidence about leading or feeling unqualified; being unassertive.
• Perfectionism: Setting unrealistic expectations for yourself or others; needing things to be flawless.
• Procrastination: Putting things off until later or the last minute.
• Short game focus: Failing to invest in the future and deciding important things without considering the long term.
• Workaholism: Being addicted to work and struggling to switch it off.

Some of those derailers flow from the tendency to be a rescue manager. It feels so good to sweep in when someone is struggling and save them. New Zealand consultant Suzi McAlpine was alerted to that tendency when she was trying to help a struggling employee and her boss asked: “What is your responsibility in this situation – and more importantly what is not?”

She warns against consciously or unconsciously thinking it’s your job to “fix” a person on your team and becoming hyper-focused on that effort. Another sign of danger can be that you jump in early and often fix a problem without letting your team try to work through the solution themselves. That can, in turn, lead to another sign of the rescue style: Although your team members often confide in you and come to you with their problems, they rarely arrive primed with potential solutions or ideas themselves.

She recommends shifting your mindset. “What if you view your team member not as a victim who needs saving but rather, a resourceful person with the potential to create (or co-create) a solution? How might that change your approach?” she asks on her blog.

Coach, instead of rescue. Pause, listen and ask more open questions. Do that more than jumping in, giving advice or taking charge of the issue yourself, she advises.

Managing is difficult. But as the Gartner researchers point out, it’s important to understand your weaknesses and improve.

Cannonballs

• If Mondays are rough for you, productivity consultant Laura Vanderkam recommends reducing the number of decisions on minor things by adopting a standard approach. Decide that you will always wear a certain outfit that day, eat the same dinner, have the kids buy lunch that day and even listen to a favourite podcast on the drive home. Make Mondays automatic.
• Planning is not an annual event, warns executive coach Dan Rockwell. If you rely on plans made at the start of the year, you are actually planning a disaster. When circumstances change, be quick to adjust. Course adjustments reflect agility, not failure.
• Alan Mulally, former chief executive officer of Ford and Boeing, is famous for telling his employees, “I love you all,” and is not ashamed of such strong language. “I love humanity, I love human beings and I love serving them,” he tells Chief Executive.

Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.