How Manager Training Can More Effectively Build High Performing Teams
Organisations strengthen workplace productivity by providing their leaders with training that incorporates new thinking, tools and techniques.
Organisations spend hundreds of billions of dollars every year training their managers how to build high-performing teams but they're not making the most of these efforts. One of the main reasons is that new ways of thinking about workplace performance haven't been integrated into traditional management training. As a result, managers often miss out on important factors that would help empower their teams and unlock their potential. Not only do their teams underperform, but their customers are not as satisfied, and their staff turnover is higher than it should be.
Organisations that research team productivity like Google and Gallup have found that new approaches to management can help teams perform better. As employers respond to the call for renewed leadership training programmes, here's what they need to keep in mind.
People work in teams.
Managers are used to thinking of the workplace as made up of individuals. After all, they hire individuals, they pay individual salaries and they train people to improve individual skills. They reward or punish and promote or terminate on an individual basis.
But people are intensely social beings. They are greatly affected by the people around them, especially their work team and their immediate supervisor. Dr. Amy Edmondson, a Harvard researcher, discovered that people's ability to perform in a work team is directly related to how comfortable they feel speaking up in their group. This feeling is called psychological safety. The more psychologically safe people feel, the better they can perform.
Because managers need to build high-performing teams, their training must help them understand how team psychological safety influences how work gets done, how problems get solved, and how people work together. Managers must learn how each person's need for trust and belonging provide the foundation for healthy team collaboration. They must learn how to simultaneously build team psychological safety while also driving for results.
Right now, only 1 in 8 managers does this well. This highlights a critical opportunity that management training should now address.
Team dynamics can now be measured and correlated with performance.
Learning any subject becomes more interesting and effective when things can be measured. Think about musical notes or engineering formulas or chemistry equations. For any subject, accurate and objective measures help students learn about the subject, apply the concepts, and assess their progress.
Measuring workplace behaviour has been more challenging. The complexity of human beings makes it difficult to pick out measurable attributes, never mind quantifying them. Attempts to link human behaviour with business outcomes have also been elusive except in the largest research projects. For example, Gallup published a study in 2016 that examined the consequences of employee engagement. It needed 1.8 million responses across 230 organisations to reach its conclusions.
This changed in 2019. My company developed a survey instrument that measures team psychological safety in detail. Since then, our work with dozens of organisations has found that team psychological safety can have significant statistical correlations with metrics like sales conversion rates, customer satisfaction and employee turnover.
Management training can now become more effective by adding a real-time assessment of a manager's team. The theory of workplace behaviour and its impact on team performance can be brought to life with a living case study.
Leadership training must be practical and applied.
By itself, theoretical training can leave students struggling to apply their new learnings and this has real-world consequences. We would never allow pilots or surgeons to train this way and yet we train managers this way every day. By adding an assessment, however, manager training is transformed.
Here’s an example. In one retail client we worked with, we saw that sales effectiveness varied a lot between stores. We also found that sales effectiveness was strongly correlated with psychological safety in the stores. During manager training, we didn’t focus on sales effectiveness. Rather, we helped each manager understand which areas of psychological safety could be improved in their team. After this intervention the company measured an overall rise in sales close rates from 20% to 22% over three months, resulting in an annualised revenue lift of AUD$19 million.
Providing a manager with their team’s assessment at the start of training benefits the manager in several ways:
It brings the theory to life by relating it to their team's experience.
It helps the manager consider aspects of their team that need attention.
The manager can build a tailored action plan to sustain and support their team.
When the team is re-assessed in a few months, the manager gains objective feedback on their effectiveness. As they repeat the process they continue to improve their skills and build their team.
Organisations also benefit. They strengthen workplace productivity by providing their leaders with training that incorporates new thinking, tools and techniques. Managers are able to develop strategies that simultaneously increase productivity and improve team culture. The result? An organisation with lower turnover that performs measurably better.
