What Does It Mean to Be a Manager Today?

The most effective managers of the future will be able to lead with empathy, although the 2021 Garner survey shows that only 47% of managers are prepared for this future role.

Qualities of the empathic manager:

• They can go beyond understanding the facts of work. They proactively seek information to put themselves in their employees' context.
• They develop high levels of trust and care and a culture of acceptance within teams.

While managers understand empathy, they are unsure how to use it as a managers tool.

How to build empathy:

• Managers should engage in one-on-one conversations with their peers to diagnose current managerial challenges.
• These conversations will offer a chance to engage in vulnerable discussions on how to support the well-being of their team.
• Most importantly, these conversations offer managers the opportunity to make mistakes and learn to lead with empathy.

While the roles of managers have expanded, roles and teams are not structured to support well-being.

Managers are more motivated to be empathic when they have a support system. Goodway Groups, a fully remote company, acknowledges that distributed teams face greater challenges with communication and shared visibility. They created a team success partner whose duties include fostering trust and psychological safety and supporting team health. Managers work with the team success partners.

Managers are overburdened by the demands of the changing work environment. Actions that focus on empathy is time-consuming.

In recognising the pressure on managers to maintain team connectedness in a remote environment, leaders should rebalance their managers' workload. Managers should prioritise their workload to focus on fewer, higher-impact relationships with individuals and teams.