Five powerful trends in the workplace today are making it harder than ever to manage people: the intensity, complexity, and pace of work is increasing; most organizations are understaffed in multiple key areas; the number of employees officially reporting to each manager is increasing; managers are under increasing pressure to boost their teams’ productivity and quality; and more work is handled in interdependent working relationships and cross-functional teams.
As a result, managers are struggling in seven key best practice areas:
- Delegating new complex responsibilities, tasks, and projects to team members
- Onboarding and getting new team members up to speed
- Providing employees with timely course-correcting feedback and trouble-shooting
- Helping employees stay on track with meeting and exceeding their goals and deadlines
- Supporting, celebrating, and rewarding above-and-beyond performance
- Helping employees meet work-life balance needs
- Implementing effective performance improvement plans with low performers and terminating recalcitrant low performers