3 Ways to Build Healthy Employee - Manager Relationships
Everyone has to deal with various ups and downs in their work relationships. Sometimes the coworkers are great and the bosses are nightmares - or the other way around. When employees and managers work well together, though, those relationships can yield plenty of benefits for everyone involved (including the organization in general). For that reason, companies should prioritize building and nurturing healthy employee-manager relationships, starting with these three strategies.
A Call for a New Kind of Leadership
As COVID-19 sweeps across the globe, it's accompanied by widespread anxiety about an uncertain future. The economy, public health, schools and education, society in general - everything is evolving moment by moment, and no one knows where things will end up. Many employees are working from home (or least trying to work while their children are racing around the house, thanks to school and daycare closures), and in such uncertain times they need a new kind of leadership: leaders who inspire, motivate, and possess the qualities needed to guide employees during this unprecedented time.
Dealing with Resistance to Organizational Change
Life is full of situations in which two people have very different perspectives on the same thing. Many of these disagreements center on fairly trivial topics (e.g., which animals make the best pets, what the greatest movie ever made is), but sometimes they are about subjects with much larger implications. Organizational change is one such topic - and a potentially controversial and polarizing one, too, because often when it comes up some people are simply unable or unwilling to visualize the new possibility. In those cases their resistance can influence whether a proposal moves forward successfully.
How Nice Leaders Become Angry
Anger is a strange and hard-to-understand emotion, especially when otherwise affable or thoughtful people become leaders and start to exhibit it more and more frequently. The people being led then begin to question what they thought they knew about their leaders (e.g., CEOs, department heads, principals, pastors), and the leaders themselves often wonder whether they've suddenly given in to the dark side of power. What's particularly strange and ironic about this scenario is that in many cases unintended anger on the part of leaders actually results in their tendency to want to be too nice.
How to Increase the Value of Feedback
Although feedback can play a large role in improving learning and increasing performance, it must be given frequently and effectively for it to hold any power. In many organizations, these conversations about improvement happen only annually or quarterly. But they should really be taking place at least weekly. So why aren't they happening more frequently?
Why Traditional Feedback Doesn't Work
The feedback process is often an unpleasant experience that can even take a physical toll on employees. One study found that receiving unsolicited feedback was as stressful as public speaking (enough to cause umping heart rates!). Under those circumstances, feedback can lose much of its effectiveness:
