5 Ways to Help Your Line Managers Thrive

Research has found line managers’ jobs are ten times harder than they were before COVID, and it’s not hard to see why: burnout out in their teams, high levels of stress, continued low levels of engagement, grieving  loss and change caused by the pandemic; managers have increasingly been absorbing this emotional fallout for nearly three years. In 2020 alone, 71% of managers experienced burnout themselves at least once.

As the cost of living crisis continues, engagement continues to dip, and stress mounts, the pressures on managers will continue to rise as well. While expected to impact line managers across the board, line managers of early talent may have it the hardest: Recent polls have found that under-30s are less likely to believe they should go above and beyond at work, and 4 out of 10 managers say they’re putting in extra time and effort because team members under thirty are doing less.

Should organisations be concerned? It’s no secret that line managers have a disproportionate impact on people engagement and retention: they can account for up to 70% variance in people engagement scores across a business, and one 2019 poll found that 75% of people who voluntarily left their role did so for reasons their line manager could directly influence. Put simply: people don’t leave companies, they leave managers. Failing to properly invest in your line managers can directly impact your bottom line.

Here are five ways to help your line managers thrive:

1) Map out your line manager journey

Journey thinking is a fundamental building block for creating high impact, high value line manager learning and development. What does it mean to think in journeys?

• Adopt a human-centred design lens. Ask your line managers what their experience of line management has been. Listen to their answers. Be empathetic in your approach.
• Use this input to map out their experience. Not simply in terms of procedural points—these are valuable to understand—but also in terms of their emotional and personal journey within your organisation.
• Identify the key inflection points in their journey. When have they struggled or needed support? When have they thrived?

Journey mapping in this way can range from a rapid exercise that builds a baseline understanding of what next steps are needed, to an in-depth immersion that allows you to fully optimise your line manager development programme.

2) Design for the liminal stage

When an individual becomes a line manager, they are undergoing what anthropologists call a “liminal stage”—or a transition period between two fixed identities or ways of being.

The skills that a person has mastered to build technical expertise will not necessarily translate into successful people management. The transition from technical expert to people manager comes with the uncertainty and discomfort of navigating unknowns in a liminal stage. There are two ways you can support your managers through this transition:

• Be open about the liminal stage your line managers are experiencing. Let them know they won’t always get it right. It can be liberating to know that it’s ok to be human, even as you lead other people.
• Provide the skills to navigate this transition. These can include soft management skills like resilience or growth mindset, but could also be more in-depth: for example, exploring a scientific understanding of the biases and heuristics that might inadvertently shape their management style, and the tools to manage these. Such skills allow line managers to navigate their journey to being leaders and managers, not just effectively manage their people.

3) Curate your critical skills

Line management is, at its core, a cultural practice. It’s a reflection of your organisational culture, the context your people operate within, and the goals your business wants to achieve through its people.

What’s the single-best way to ensure your line managers are embodying your company culture, and passing on your organisational values to your next generation of leaders?  Upskilling.

This can include communication skills like giving & receiving feedback and navigating challenge & conflict. Accountability skills for building trust & planning, goal setting and delegation. And key coaching skills for embodying DEI&B and approaching empathetic leadership.

No organisation will have the same essential skills for high-performing managers. Hone yours by consulting your line managers. They will be the best people to know which skills are baseline fundamentals, and you might find surprising wildcards that end up further solidifying line management at your company with your organisational culture.

4) Create a psychologically safe space

Line managing is a fundamentally human activity. And therefore, an imperfect one. Line managers might get it wrong, might be uncertain, might not always know the best path forward with their line reports. If you create psychological safety, your managers know they can ask questions, voice their concerns, and show vulnerability without worrying it will damage their reputation or brand. In fostering psychological safety, you are enabling your line managers to be their best for their people.

How can you best foster this? Consider how you design your training. Allow space for experimentation and failure. Incorporate play to lower the stakes. Embed opportunities for exchange and discussion between line managers. Role modelling vulnerability from your senior leaders. There are a myriad of tricks and tips for learning and development that embeds psychological safety into its fabric—use them.

5) Account for their day-to-day

Line managers, in addition to overseeing their line reports, have a day job. This means their usual work commitments have to be met (or exceeded, of course) while also committing time to their line reports. Often, as a result, line managers can feel short on time or have to divide their priorities between their line reports and their role-based responsibilities. This presents an additional layer of complexity when it comes to designing and delivering effective learning: safeguarding the time for line managers to fully focus on their development as line managers.

Although short, sharp learning can be most effective for time-poor line managers, punctuate this with collective learning experiences that allow them to grow their networks and build a sense of community. In practice, this could mean providing interactive resources and toolkits to introduce your line managers to processes, supplemented with self-led missions on line management fundamentals, and capped with one to two moments of collective learning (in-person or virtual), with ample opportunities for conversation and exchange with their peers.

How can you equip your line managers with the right tools?

Our Line Manager Toolkit uses science, human-centred principles and practical case study examples to explore how best to level up your line managers to be higher-performing at a time when a new approach to leadership is sorely needed for organisations to thrive.

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