The People To Land Your Vision Aren’t Who You Think They Are

Conferences and Keynotes.
Retreats and Away Days.
Coaching and Development.
Support and Focused Interest…

…just a few of the things senior people experience regularly but which a more junior population tends to miss out on. Why does greater seniority mean increased central support, with lower ranking managers (who are closest to the action) left painfully short of attention?

Imagine this; you’re a multi-site company refreshing your corporate values, or have developed a new brand strategy or identified new strategic priorities. Thousands of your employees will be impacted and millions of your customers. This stuff matters, so you engage your senior managers over weeks and months before making any formal announcements. You spend money on off-sites with high production value and dedicate multiple man-hours to ensure the key messages land with maximum impact. You follow up with conference calls and provide supporting briefing packs. You might even carve out time for 1:1 follow-up discussions to make sure all your senior people are on board, that they understand the detail and are primed and ready to execute.

AN AGE-OLD, MISTAKEN APPROACH
It’s a positive start, but now there’s a challenge. When it comes to engaging leaders further down the organisation and the front-line staff they manage, your scale might mean hundreds of teams and thousands of people to communicate with, across different sites, reporting lines and shift patterns. This feels like a problem. Except by now, you want it all done quickly.

And this next step is always a problem. You’ve invested serious time, effort and budget as an organisation to get this far, so now you’re driven by a speed metric. And speed trumps quality, so you revert to an age-old, yet mistaken approach. You’ll soon be getting busy with other multiple priorities and this looks and feels like efficient, pacey delivery. The ‘solution’ is a rushed dissemination of what started as a two-day conversation into ever-shorter local briefings, where unprepared managers rattle through someone else’s centrally scripted material before herding everyone back onto their hamster wheels. And if operational pressures make time even tighter, some send carefully crafted corporate comms emails, make sure people have read them and hope for the best.

Far-fetched? Cynical? Sadly not — one company I know finally ‘launched’ an expensive set of refreshed brand values by changing everyone’s corporate screen-saver overnight and declared it ‘an effective and fast engagement’. These are horrible endings to well intentioned beginnings — and the same thing I feel when I visit Ikea. I convince myself this time will be better, only to discover it’s all still as bad as I last remembered it.

THERE’S SOMETHING WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE
Beyond laziness and a mis-guided sense of short-term budget protection, how did we ever think approaches like this would work for our people in the long term. And when all the evidence and our own experiences show they don’t, why do we insist on repeating them? Victor Lipman, author of The Type B Manager, recently discussed development budgets and priorities in a Harvard Business Review article, noting that he’d received more management training in the final five years of his career than he did in the first 20 years combined.

There’s something wrong with this picture.
We’ve got the whole thing upside down.

Thankfully, there’s an alternative and it starts with two words that every junior manager or supervisor needs to feel from their organisation and which challenges the dominant operational values and hierarchical attitudes of too many executives: You’re Important.

You’re IMPORTANT.

TURNING THINGS RIGHT-SIDE-UP
Junior managers look after all the people that talk to your customers. If you’ve got a new corporate message, are pivoting a strategy in a changing market or need a multi-site team to align around a new set of business goals, they are the most important people for you to be talking to. If you want to improve your sales results, service delivery, engagement levels or the competence of the wider organisation, look outside the boardroom and exec away days to the front-lines of your organisation, where your brand meets its customers and your values are revealed through their thousands of daily interactions. A first line manager with over 15 years’ experience in a company they loved recently said to me, ‘we don’t need much, just a little attention’. Junior managers are important and they need to hear it from you in the way you organise and behave. Talk to them, listen to them, spend time with them and allow the strategic messages you communicate the time and space to breathe. Because once your leaders with the most pivotal influence are on-side, everything else becomes much, much easier.

First line, junior and new managers are the engine room of any organisation. The chairman of one of the UK’s largest retailers described them to me as ‘the beating heart’ of their business. But the problem with the hearts in our bodies or the engines in our cars is that they’re both unseen and so are too easy to ignore, forget about or abuse over time. With a little attention both respond well and tend to start running more effectively. Turn your company right-side-up. Make support to junior managers an operational and strategic priority. Technology makes this easier now than at any other point in history, but an attitudinal upgrade needs to happen first and it starts with every one of us who’s moved beyond the front-line.

First line, junior and new managers matter. Focus your organisation on supporting and developing them on a long-term and ongoing basis. Tell them they’re important and show them you believe it by engaging with them properly. You’ll find yourself delivering your plans rather than only cascading them…and your people and customers will thank you for it.