Managers need to allow employees to think creatively about solving a problem or completing a task if they want to unlock productivity in their organisations.
This is according to a panel of people leaders from the retail, hospitality and care sectors, who said managers should give their teams more autonomy, not only to free up their time but to facilitate career development and drive productivity and engagement.
Speaking at an event hosted by management coaching provider Notion, Sainsbury’s director of talent and people development Stuart Comer said overcoming the UK’s productivity woes involves managers acting as facilitators, rather than dictating how a task should be completed.
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He said Sainsbury’s discovered what its employees could achieve during the pandemic, when its online business suddenly needed to ramp up capacity to cope with demand for home deliveries. People with a variety of skills and grades came together to find a way of increasing the retailer’s operational capabilities, with little involvement from leadership.
“[Managers and leaders] got out of the way and let people get on with it,” he said. “We had no other choice; we had limited resources, limited people available and massive hurdles to overcome.
“We realised we had a massive amount of potential we hadn’t tapped into, and that unleashed momentum and opportunity we probably wouldn’t have opened our eyes to [had the pandemic not happened].
“This is now you unleash productivity. It’s not about systems and AI and tech, although they play a large part; it’s always going to be about the human beings that sit behind it. And our job, and managers’ jobs, is to find ways to unleash that potential.”
Jillian MacLean, founder and CEO of bar and restaurant group Drake & Morgan, said managers needed to have compassion, humility, creativity, and the time to listen to their colleagues.
“One of the things I think is very important is giving people the encouragement and the opportunity to fail, and to forgive them if things fail,” she said.
“Our model is 85% templated and 11% play, so we’ve always got new and innovative things happening – the failure rate is high, but there are actually some marvellous things that have happened that have pivoted the business.”
MacLean said some of the ideas generated by colleagues, including brunch and film events, are now among the organisation’s most popular and have helped the business bounce back after lockdowns.
However, giving employees the flexibility to do things differently can be challenging in health and social care, for example. Professor Martin Green, chief executive at Care England, said that operating in a structured or heavily-regulated environment can often stifle creativity.
“What I think we should do is create an environment where people see these barriers as a challenge, not the thing that stops them from innovating,” he said.
“What we should [not] be doing is saying there’s only one way to do [something]. We need to embrace not only the creativity of our colleagues but also the creativity of our residents, who will be telling us really interesting things that would work for them.”
Increasingly the big skills that leaders and managers need are the ability to coach and to give feedback really effectively” – Stuart Comer, Sainsbury’s
Managers should give employees a clear brief and then step aside to allow employees to solve a problem themselves, said Comer. However, he recognised that many managers have a propensity to interject if they fear something is not going to be delivered as expected.
“But the concept of getting out the way does not replace the fact that as a facilitator your job is to help your team see the wood from the trees – there’s more information and a lot of distraction now – so increasingly the big skills that leaders and managers need are the ability to coach and to give feedback really effectively,” he explained.
Notion has developed a ‘STAR’ model to help develop coaching behaviours among managers, which encourages managers to ask questions to unlock employees’ productivity and potential.
A government-funded academic study into the effectiveness of the STAR Manager programme, which involved trialling the concept among 62 organisations across 14 sectors including construction, health and social care, education and manufacturing, found that managers increased their time spent coaching by 70% and spent less time on managing and doing tasks that could be done by others.
Those who completed the six-month programme saw lower levels of staff attrition and higher recruitment than those who did not. Analysis by the London School of Economics found managers increased their skills across nine competencies, including listening, communication and handling challenging conversations.
Laura Ashley-Timms, co-creator of the STAR model, said: “The way to [unlock potential] is by helping managers to adopt coaching-related behaviours in the moment and consistently.
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“[Managers should] learn to ask questions that will benefit others and stop telling them how to do something.”
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