
Whoa there! Halting sluggish UK management
According to a recent CIPD report, the quality of UK management has failed to improve for more than a decade. So what can we do about it?
New research from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) has found that the overall quality of management in the UK continues to trail behind the USA, Germany and others. The CIPD found little evidence of improvement since the 2003 Ketels & Porter Report* and cites this as a key reason for the UK’s long-standing productivity weakness.
The CIPD’s report recommends important changes to management practice, including to:
- Increase the amount of time that managers spend with their direct reports. Managers only spend 2.5 to 4.5 per cent of their time in discussions about work issues with the people they manage.
- Improve how managers give feedback, discuss development needs and coach their employees. These are the areas where employees say their managers perform most poorly.
- Ensure that managers actually spend time with their direct reports. One in five employees say they’ve never had a formal meeting with their manager.
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“Our research shows that between 30 and 45 per cent of employees have managerial responsibility, so small improvements in the performance of each manager can make a big difference,” says Mark Beatson, chief economist at the CIPD.
“There are small steps that businesses can take to address this, by putting high-performance policies and practices in place and by ensuring that individuals get the training they need to be effective managers – given its importance for both our productivity and well-being, we need to raise the performance of our managers across the board.”
Something has to change
As managers’ jobs grow relentlessly bigger, busyness and pressure can dominate their working lives. It can feel increasingly difficult for them to invest time in the important, non-urgent activities like talking, building relationships and developing their people. Yet we know this style of conversation makes all the difference to their teams. It builds employee engagement and trust; and improves performance. And the win/win is that these conversations can create more time, and reduce the pressure a little, for the managers.
Do you want the following benefits that coaching conversations offer your managers?
- Coaching is a powerful delegation tool, so managers regain valuable time.
- People’s engagement and sense of responsibility increases as they are encouraged to ‘own’ situations and solutions.
- Openness, honesty and trust improve.
- People develop and grow.
- Organisational capability grows; performance improves.
- Quality of decisions increases as ideas are built collaboratively.
- Individuals are empowered as they learn the principles of decision and action.
How can Starr Coaching help?
We’re coach specialists with over 15 years’ experience in equipping managers to have effective, meaningful conversations with individuals and teams. We have a track record of improving the quality of manager/subordinate relationships, with a direct impact on organisational performance. As thought-leaders in the coaching field, we understand what drives effective conversations and also how to get managers to change their perspectives and approach.
Contact us now to find out how straightforward we make it for your managers to improve the effectiveness of their conversations.
*The UK Department of Trade and Industry and the Economic and Social Research Council commissioned a review of the UK’s competitiveness, with a particular emphasis on quality of management, from Michael Porter and Christian Ketels of Harvard University.