Nine Reasons You Should Read The Employee-Centric Manager

Reason 1: You want to understand what employees most want from you. This applies to all managers, even the most experienced, but especially to first timers. The truth is that many managers lack a solid understanding of what their employees want – and this can lead to a laundry list of headaches.

Reason 2: You want to be a top-notch people manager. Over 70% of managers in the United States have either received no people-management training at all, or the training received was capped at four hours. Hardly sufficient for such a huge responsibility.

​Reason 3: Unknowingly, you overestimate your competence as a people manager. Recent research shows that on people management skills, managers rate themselves about 20% more effective than employees do. Ouch! That speaks to a need for better self-awareness.

​Reason 4: You want to create a superior work experience for your employees. The trendy term for this is employee experience of EX for short. The average EX score for those working for managers scoring high on the employee-centric manager scale is 95%, for managers who score low, only 21%. By the way, EX is the means to employee engagement.

​Reason 5: You want to create more engaged teams. For over 20 years we have known employee engagement is a predictor of performance success. Engagement scores for high-rated employee-centric managers (ECMs) is 97%, for low-rated ECMs, 20%. Remember, engagement predicts performance.

Reason 6: You’re looking for ways to enable a more positive and inclusive work environment. Positive team chemistry involves people respecting one another, cooperating, and resolving conflicts quickly. High-rated ECMs manage teams whose chemistry scores average 99% (and you can’t go higher than 100%); the average for low-rated ECMs is only 41%. On which team would you like to work?

​Reason 7: Achieving higher levels of team performance is a top priority for you. In reality, who in their right mind wouldn’t have this a top priority? How your team performs is what makes the biggest impression on your bosses and most influences the trajectory of your career. Here’s what we learned: team performance scores for high-rated ECMs is 99%, only 39% for their low-rated counterparts.

​Reason 8: You’d love to boost your overall managerial effectiveness ratings. Doesn’t your own experience tell you that the higher your performance ratings, the greater your pay increases and the better your promotional opportunities? But here is what you may not know: how employees rate their managers on the ECM attributes accounts for 67% of their overall effectiveness. Bottom-line: if you rate highly as an employee-centric manager, you are virtually guaranteed to rate highly on overall performance.  

Reason 9: You want an evidence-based pathway for employee, team, and personal success. There are eight universal attributes that employees want in their managers. Those who master them are highly effective. Highly effective managers contribute to better EX and higher employee engagement as well as better team chemistry and higher team performance. No surprise: these managers enjoy the best compensation and promotion opportunities.