Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom

The Plight of the Middle Manager in 2022

Welcome to our blog series on middle managers. Over the next two months, we will focus on the millions who comprise this heroic group. We’ll start with an overview of modern middle manager challenges and follow with some individual perspectives from middle managers. Our final two posts will cover general solutions and technology-specific solutions for supporting the middle managers in our organizations.

When I was 24 years old and working in a junior-level PR job in New York City, I decided to write a book about everything work-related I hadn’t been taught in college. Burnout was top of mind.

As it turns out, I had no idea.

Fast forward 20 years, and many of my generational compatriots are middle managers. They took these roles at a time when burnout had increased so much that the World Health Organization had labeled it an “occupational phenomenon.” And, in conjunction with the COVID-19 pandemic, late 2021 survey data from Gallup found that manager and middle manager burnout is only getting worse and is precipitously higher than individual contributor burnout.

It's not just the pandemic

It’s easy to attribute burnout to working two years in a pandemic, but the issue is more nuanced and multifactorial. First, let’s consider the role within the organization. A manager in the middle of several layers of hierarchy must maintain relationships with those below them and those above them. “It requires being both a proactive leader to direct reports and an engaged follower to the top management – all at the same time,” wrote Zahira Jaser last year in Harvard Business Review.

Jaser explored other challenges facing middle managers, including the need to create a dialogue with and appease people with conflicting agendas, to amplify the voices of direct reports upwards, and to critically appraise and balance dilemmas.

Do middle managers receive proper training for this complex dance? It depends, but the answer is often no. Ceridian’s 2022 Executive Survey found that while leaders recognize the value of middle managers, they aren’t always great at supporting them.

When Executive Survey respondents were asked how their organizations support middle managers, only half (51%) said their organizations offer management training programs.

A lack of comprehensive leadership development guidance and mentoring often leaves middle managers feeling less secure. Millennial managers are especially vulnerable to getting in over their heads, as they were promoted into supervisory positions much earlier than prior generations. All these factors lead to a profound experience of middle manager burnout.

For the rest of this piece, head over to the Ceridian website.

Americans Feel Their Employers View Them As Disposable

A new DeVry University study conducted for Labor Day found that at a time when American workers should feel recognized and celebrated, more than a third felt their employers could take or leave them.

Thirty-six percent of DeVry respondents said that based on their employers’ actions since the start of the pandemic, they believe their employers view them as disposable. This perception resonated  more with younger workers than older ones, with 47 percent of Gen Z-ers (born after 1996) and 42 percent of millennials (born 1980-95) saying they felt disposable compared with 28 percent of Gen X-ers (born 1964-79) and 32 percent of baby boomers (born 1946-63).

Respondents agreed that in today’s workforce, tenure, education, and industry experience do not matter as much as hard work,  meeting goals and deadlines, and having a positive attitude.

If you’re an employee, being disposable is clearly not the ideal status as it makes you vulnerable to layoffs, consolidations, or random turns in your marketplace. Fortunately, you can protect yourself from natural evolution and future disruptions by focusing on your career durability, or your ability to sustain gainful employment over a long period of time. The five components of career durability include:

Soft skills are interpersonal attributes that you need to collaborate successfully with others at work. As machines take over more work tasks over the next 10 years, soft skills like empathy, intuition, diplomacy, judgment, and problem solving will set human employees apart. You can hone yours through personality assessments/recommendations, classic business books such as those by Stephen Covey and Dale Carnegie, and on-the-job experience.

Hard skills are those in a specific area for which learning can be measured (i.e. you either know it or you don’t). If you’re applying for a given job, employers will expect you to perform the requisite functions. For instance, if you’re a phlebotomist, you must know how to insert an IV. You can acquire the hard skills you need via degree programs, online courses, certifications/microcredentials,  and employer training.

Applied technology skills represent the ability to leverage people, processes, data, and devices to do a job more efficiently. In all occupations, digital technology exists to augment human work. But do you know, for example, what software is available in your role and how to use it? You might increase your base of applied technology skills with employer training, mentorship, solo exploration, and investigation.

Institutional knowledge is industry specific expertise gained through experience and/or tenure. Organizations are facing a brain drain caused by the retiring baby boomers. Some things can only be learned by facing similar scenarios multiple times over a career lifespan. You typically acquire institutional knowledge by staying with one company or in one industry and gaining cross-functional and adjacent expertise via job shadowing, informational interviewing, and volunteering.

A growth mindset is the positive attitude that influences how an individual sees their world, and that motivates them to learn and change. Today’s learner must be continuous and self-directed, and curiosity, agility, and drive to improve will win the day. You can enhance your growth mindset through self, peer, and manager evaluations, acceptance of failure, implementation of constructive feedback, intrapreneurship, and inspirational books and podcasts.

Employee actions are only one piece of the puzzle, however. What if you’re an employer, and you’re rightfully concerned that so many of your talent employees feel disposable? Improved benefits and greater pandemic safety measures are essential, but don’t get to the heart of the disposability issue. The key  is to show appreciation early and often. The DeVry survey respondents indicated that the most effective ways are through pay increases (69 percent), awards (34 percent), and greater schedule flexibility (30 percent).

This year especially, Labor Day is an appropriate time to take the right steps so employment is beneficial and satisfying for all sides.

Agile Feedback is the New Performance Review

Many of us remember the days when we only talked about professional development during a once-a-year performance review conversation with our managers. We may have made development plans and set goals, but these were usually lost in the crush of immediate business priorities. And, by the time we got around to discussing them again, they were outdated and irrelevant.

Fortunately, many organizations have, in recent years, moved from the annual performance management model to bi-annual or even monthly models. This increase in frequently certainly benefits the process, but can we take it even further? Can we make learning and performance dialogue even more fluid and agile and therefore more useful considering the pace of change in our organizations and industries?

The Rise of Open and Continuous Dialogue

Today’s most comprehensive HRMS offer the ability for managers and employees to deliver real-time guidance and feedback as soon as an issue presents itself. This type of exchange is far more helpful for growth and engagement because it’s directly relevant to a current project or challenge. Typically, any employee can submit feedback to another regardless of level or reporting structure, so it’s an equal-opportunity endeavor that’s less biased and less restrictive.

Agile feedback systems provide an important mechanism for coaching and collaboration, and in boosting manager awareness of problems sooner rather than later, they aid in retention as well. They also alert leaders when there may be a new skills gap that needs to be addressed. For instance, if a manager sees results that indicate that a group of employees isn’t using a new technology as intended, they can get involved right away, collect more information about the disconnect, and ultimately determine if additional background or training is necessary.

For more where this came from, head over to the SilkRoad blog.

Designing the Right Physical Workspaces

In my work as a human resources and leadership consultant, I’ve observed that many organizations have dedicated spaces where employees come together to receive training. Most of the time, these locations are basic conference rooms, which led me to wonder: what if companies could build facilities uniquely equipped to meet the needs of the human learner?

Seeking to find out what such spaces might look like and what best practices organizations would be smart to integrate, I spoke with Jonathan Webb, VP of workplace strategy for KI, a designer of 21^st century interior furnishings.

Alexandra: Jonathan, how should companies go about designing the right physical space for corporate training?

Jonathan: In some ways, the key to creating corporate training spaces is the same as designing offices: flexibility. Just as employees have different work styles throughout their 9-to-5 day, new hires in corporate training have different learning styles. So recruiters have to design training spaces not only to enable the variety of tasks or lessons at hand, but to support the variety of learners they're training in a given session.

What physical design concepts best facilitate human learning and why?

Jonathan: I think it entirely depends on what the goals are within each learning session. That's why it's important to align a company's training goals with the physical learning environment. Designing a flexible training space is vital to facilitating human learning. For example, if one training task requires an individual assessment, new hires may need walled-in spaces or privacy screens to focus. But if another goal of the training program is to build relationships among teams that will soon work together, trainees may move to larger, shared work surfaces.

If an organization doesn't have a big budget for renovation, what tweaks can it make help improve its training spaces?

Jonathan: Training facilities are often overlooked within organizations, but an organization can make some effective changes without knocking down any walls. When space is at a premium, designing workspaces that can be reconfigured to accommodate various learning styles and types is paramount. Flexible furniture on casters can be reconfigured quickly. Mobile whiteboards can double as space dividers and learning surfaces to provide excellent teaming environments. A mix of high and low tables, along with several pieces of lounge furniture, can often be assembled to allow various types of group work.

For the rest of the interview, head over to the DeVry WORKS website.

Engagement Isn't Everything

Most know that diminished engagement has reached a crisis point – only 30 percent of workers are engaged. Eighty nine percent of Glassdoor users are either actively looking for new jobs or would consider better opportunities. And 93 percent of workers that took a new job did so outside their current organizations.

According to analyst Ben Eubanks, our mistake as HR professionals lies in thinking that our leaders are focused on engagement as a unique outcome. But engagement is typically not the end variable. Rather, CEOs want to move the needle on productivity, customer satisfaction, retention, and revenue. The key is to understand how employee engagement impacts all of these things.

For example, per IBM, employees who score highly on the experience index, which is correlated with engagement, gave 40 percentage points more discretionary effort and were therefore far more productive. Per Aon Hewitt, teams of engaged employees saw an additional 25 percent growth in Net Promoter Scores. The Corporate Leadership Council found that engaged employees have the potential to reduce staff turnover up to 87 percent, while Hay Group discovered that engaged workforces lead to 2.5 percent annual revenue growth.

In building a business case to focus on engagement, you must make an effort to use the same language as your leaders. Eubanks suggested that you gather data on these metrics (productivity, customer satisfaction, retention, revenue, etc.) as they currently exist in your business. Plot them against your employee engagement data and note any connections or correlations. What are your strongest conclusions? For instance, is there a team that’s driving the greatest business value that you need to focus on engaging and retaining?

For the rest of this post, please visit the SilkRoad blog.

When Considering Employee Experience, Don't Forget About Culture

I recently presented a webinar, Employee as Consumer: Building a Differentiated Experience Through the Lifecycle, with HR Daily Advisor and SilkRoad.  We talked about the consumerization of HR, the creation of a meaningful employee experience throughout the lifecycle, and how design thinking, talent activation, and employer branding play into it.

At the end of the session, Jennifer asked: How do you create an experience that’s meaningful and impactful for different cultures? This is an excellent question, and both global and non-global organizations are becoming more interconnected with every passing year. But according to recent McKinsey research, only half of executives in global companies think they are effective at tailoring candidate and employee communications for different geographies.

The first step, of course, is to recognize that you can’t offer a one-size-fits-all experience to candidates and employees across the globe, even ones who are in the same demographic or perform the same role. You should seek to understand even the most subtle factors that drive engagement and motivation in other cultures. For instance, consulting firm Seven Step used Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions Theory to tease out country-specific essentials. These include:

• China: This culture views titles within the workplace as extremely important. Given this focus on status, companies should integrate distinctions such as awards and competitive rankings in their experiences. In China, individualism is low and language is viewed as a unifying agent. Flexibility with language translation enhances the experience while positioning the organization as a true member of the community.

• Central Europe: This culture is more risk-averse and ambiguity is viewed negatively. Job seekers and employees prefer to weigh the facts of an opportunity rather than taking a chance. Experiences in Central Europe should be content heavy, focusing on the explicit details of roles and responsibilities.

• Latin America: This collectivist culture encourages one to think of the group before himself. Organizations should ensure that experiences incorporate the use of “we” instead of a company name. Also, Latin Americans think of their careers within the context of their industry, not their company. Therefore, experiences should portray how every role is aligns with larger industry goals and achievements.

For more on Jennifer's question, check out the SilkRoad blog.

Better Office Seating Arrangements Increase Productivity

In a recent article in Harvard Business Review, Jason Corsello and Dylan Minor described the results of a new study, which suggested that who an employee sits next to affects how they perform — and that grouping the right types of coworkers together can improve productivity and work quality.

The study was built upon the concept of “spatial management,” or the pursuit of how to best physically locate workers within an organization. Cornerstone analyzed the data of more than 2,000 employees over a two-year period provided by a large technology company with locations in the U.S. and Europe. This data included worker performance on three key metrics: productivity, or the average length of time it took a worker to complete a task; effectiveness, or the average daily rate at which a worker needed to refer a task to a different worker to solve; and quality, or the client’s satisfaction with the task.

For each employee on each of these three metrics, the researchers calculated what they called “spillover,” or a measure of the performance of the employee’s surrounding peers. The HBR article used this example: assume a worker has three coworkers: one sits next to her, one sits 25 feet away, and another sits 50 feet away. The researchers looked at the performance of the three coworkers along with their distance from the worker, and through data modeling measured the average spillover of co-worker performance on the worker.

They also divided employees into three types of workers: productive, generalist, and quality. Productive workers are very productive but lack in quality, while quality workers produce superior quality but lack in productivity. Generalists are average on both dimensions.

Birds of a Feather Shouldn’t Flock Together

The results indicated that neighbors have a significant impact on an employee’s performance, and it can be either positive or negative. So naturally, the study asked the question: what types of workers should be seated together? The results confirmed that matching productive and quality workers together and matching generalists separately generates up to 15 percent of increased organizational performance.

However, seating two productive workers together did not significantly increase their productivity — nor did placing quality workers together increase their work quality. And since generalists were average in both categories, they were less affected by spillover effects from either side. So, in a nutshell, symbiotic relationships are created from pairing those with opposite strengths. It turns out that those strong on one dimension are not very affected by spillover on that dimension. But, they are very sensitive to spillover on their weak dimension.

For the rest of the piece, head over to the QuickBase Fast Track blog.

20 Years Later, Much Career Advice Still Applies

In the summer of 1996 after my sophomore year of college, I started an internship at a nonprofit technology association in downtown Washington, D.C.

Until that point, I’d only worked in retail and had no idea what to expect. I asked my father and a professor for advice. Remarkably, 20 years later much of that guidance still resonates.

Doors open based on who you know

In the late 90s, these were physical doors rather than virtual ones, but the concept is the same. When applying for a job or looking to connect with someone, name-dropping would increase your odds of getting a positive response. Today, although we have exponentially larger networks thanks to social media, deep, in-person relationships still provide the greatest networking benefit. 

As you build your network of contacts, remember to follow up

Meeting a contact once is a wasted opportunity unless you periodically remind him or her of who you are and take steps to grow the relationship over time. In the 90s, I was encouraged to send snail mail holiday cards to former bosses and colleagues, and even to pick up the phone occasionally. Twenty years later, it’s all about LinkedIn.

In a new situation, aim to assimilate

Corporate culture used to be “one-size-fits-all.” If you worked in a business office in any city in the world, you were expected to behave professionally, adhere to hierarchies, and generally do what you were told without making waves. Individual company cultures may be more unique today (conservative versus liberal, strict versus playful) but the need to examine and then fit into a new culture – whatever it may be – remains.

For the rest of the piece, head over to my new Mashable column.

 

Is Rejection a Badge of Honor?

But although unpleasant, rejection can be seen as a critical warning and/or badge of honor. This post, featuring an exclusive interview with Halley Bock, author of Life, Incorporated, will explore the types of professional rejection, how you should take it in different situations, and what it means when you’re not experiencing any.

What are the different types of professional rejection?

Rejection can come in many forms – personal and professional, subjective and objective – and there isn’t much delineation except the setting in which it occurs. In the workplace, it could show up as a project abandoned, a team member suddenly disengaged or hostile, a plan hopelessly complex, a budget undermined by economic fallout, or an idea with no buy-in to support it. And while rejection can feel demeaning and frustrating, each rejection gives us the opportunity to categorize it as either a critical warning — a beacon illuminating an alternative path — or a badge of honor — a rumble meant to test internal drive.

In which situations might rejection be a warning? How can you accurately identify it as such?

Rejection may serve as a critical warning when we either repeatedly experience it in a particular situation. This perhaps indicates a need for us to alter our behavior and/or approach. Or, when despite all of our best laid plans, roadblocks and issues persist. In my experience as a CEO, nine out of 10 times, rejections were due to extenuating forces that had nothing to do with the validity, cleverness, or implementation of the effort itself. Instead, ideas didn’t work when they were ill-timed. Strategies didn’t pan out when there was a shift coming around the corner that would change everything. Relationships stalled when we were coming together for the wrong reasons.

Turns out, rejection was the universe’s way of saying: “Not now. Something else needs to happen first.” When I learned to listen to the resistance and let go of a preconceived outcome, the organization hardly missed a beat and simply kept growing. I stopped thinking of rejections in terms of failed strategies. Instead, they were simply ideas ahead of their time.

On the other hand, if I received the same negative feedback or rejection after repeated attempts at a particular idea, project, or relationship, then it was time to take inventory of the situation. I could either decide that, despite the rejection by others, my passion for a particular idea still resonated deeply. In this case, I continued to pursue it provided that no one would pay an emotional or financial price for my efforts. Or, I would step back, evaluate my approach, and make adjustments in order to get better results.

How should you address rejection in different situations?

Should you perceive a rejection as a critical warning where adjustments in behavior, direction, and strategy are required, an attitude and mindset of curiosity is the most essential tool.

If you are in a situation in which your idea is meeting heavy resistance, lean into the resistance and genuinely ask for feedback. Maybe the way in which you are pitching your idea is unclear or contains too much bravado. Or, your quiet nature has wrongly been perceived as aloof and arrogant. The only way to find out is to ask.

Use questions like: “Dan, I admire your opinion and have noticed your success in getting teams behind your ideas. Would you be willing to give me feedback on my idea and the way in which I am putting it forward?” Or: “Sarah, in our conversation last week, you seemed frustrated and impatient with me. It’s important to me that our working relationship is solid. Would you mind telling me if my perception was accurate and, if so, what you might suggest for a more positive interaction next time?” Regardless of the answers you receive, you can decide how much feedback to take or leave.

For the rest of the interview, head over to the QuickBase Fast Track blog.

New Career Advisory Board Research Reveals Employers Are Lukewarm About Talent Development

This week, my organization the Career Advisory Board announced the results of our sixth annual Job Preparedness Indicatory survey, which identified gaps between the skills and traits candidates have and the skills and traits employers seek to fill open positions.

Gaps were measured by assessing skills that are most important but least common among entry-level, mid-level, and senior-level job candidates. This year’s research of nearly 500 US-based, senior-level hiring managers also explored how organizations are developing the necessary skills and competencies in their workforces, as well as their level of commitment to strategic talent development and management.

Senior hiring managers are lukewarm in terms of how effective their organizations are at talent management and competency development. In this survey, few were willing to boast that they were employing sophisticated recruitment, development, and retention practices. Only 13 percent of respondents, for example, said that their companies’ talent development initiatives are very well-aligned with overall business strategy, and only 11 percent said their initiatives help “a great deal” in providing employees with the skills they need to be successful.

In order to ensure that employees are adequately trained to do their jobs, 80 percent of respondents rely on on-the-job training, 34 percent on formal mentorship, 31 percent on one-off online learning programs, and 30 percent on one-off in person learning programs.

Furthermore, only 12 percent of respondents indicated that their organizations align talent development initiatives to retention strategies “a great deal,” and only 11 percent said their companies very effectively align employee competency development to advancement at all levels. Seventeen percent of respondents said their organizations place a great deal of value on leadership development training, and only 13 percent place a great deal of value on succession planning.

Perhaps most significant, however, our respondents shared that the feel that their organizations are weak when it comes to tracking the return on investment (ROI) of talent development initiatives. Only eight percent said they do this “a great deal,” while 21 percent said they do it “a fair amount,” 31 percent said they do it “somewhat,” and 40 percent said they don’t believe that they do it at all!

For more Job Preparedness Indicator results, check out the Career Advisory Board press release and executive summary.