I sent this article to some friends the other day.  It is a great piece on how important it is to train managers, so they keep employees engaged and profitability increasing.  It is a great 2-minute read. You can find the article at:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-economys-last-best-hope-superstar-middle-managers-11553313606?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=4

I receive a response that I thought was spot on, from a CEO of a large wood products company.  He stated:

“Thank you for the article.  Though I agree wholeheartedly on the importance and value of good managers on employee engagement I think what is missing is an appreciation of the difficulty of finding those influencers.  In my opinion, it is not that it was easier in the past to find good managers – I believe it was easier in the past to be a good manager.  The expectations or more succinctly the standard from which we were coming meant that management improvement was really addressing “low hanging fruit”. I believe that today the definition of a good manager is much higher in terms of intelligence and emotional cognizance, empathy and communication skills, technical and social competence, to name a few. I think the article presents a revelation when in fact identifying the challenge is the easy part.  Addressing it is more complicated.”

When I was consulting with a company a couple of years ago, we were training managers with such strategies as Hogan Assessments, leadership & teamwork skills, helping supervisor understand process improvement and engage employees in that process, and making safety personal.

At Glacier HR, we find in the training and coaching we do that execution is the difficult part.  We recently did a survey with a company and the managers stated that the information was very useful, but some people were not using it.

Execution:  with any initiative, you need to have strategies that make execution happen.

We break training into smaller segments presented over a longer period and have participants be responsible for implementing specific skill focused ACTION PLANS that will increase their effectiveness.  Then their boss and the consultant hold them accountable.  Identifying problems is easy work, the difficult work comes in execution.

We recently have started to use an anonymous texting feedback line to stay in touch with progress, successes, and difficulties.  I’ll keep you posted.

What is the old adage? “Identify your problems but give your power and energy to solutions.”  Anonymous

Here are a couple more:

“There’s no use talking about the problem unless you talk about the solution.”  Betty Williams

“Most people spend more time and energy going around problems than in trying to solve them.” – Henry Ford