Your Managers Grow & Scale Your Business, Not You!

A key area to focus on when scaling a business is your managers.

Laura K always said, “Employees don’t quit companies…they quit managers.”

As I mentioned in my last post, if you want to scale, you need to leverage yourself through your employees. Developing your management team is one of the best ways to do it, but it takes effort as well as a willingness to learn and trust other people. I had no experience teaching managers. In fact, I had very little experience managing at all. I knew how to be scrappy, but that’s not scalable. Empowering managers is.

Years later, I’ve learned a thing or two about what to do.

The key is teaching managers to communicate frequently and effectively and to measure and monitor their efforts. How great would it be to have a formal plan for developing your managers and the tools in place to measure their efforts with their teams? I’m sure that if I compared all my managers’ communication and employee development efforts to their productivity and employee turnover, I would see a clear financial connection.

The managers that communicated with their team most often, praised them most often, provided clear direction most often, and taught them regularly would get more done. And fewer of their employees would leave the company. It just makes sense, but if you’re like me, you’ll never do it unless it’s been measured. And it has: Managers account for 70% of engagement differences across a company, and “Engagement and Culture” ranked the #1 reason for employee turnover in 2022. High-engagement companies also see a 22% boost in productivity. So investing dollars in manager development is made back by reducing turnover costs, increasing employee productivity, and ultimately reaching company goals.

Here are some things you should remember as you scale and grow your business:

1. Be a good role model for your managers and communicate regularly with your management team and your entire company.
2. Set expectations for how often you want your managers to communicate with their teams and with team members individually.
3. Train them on how to praise and give negative feedback in a group setting and individually.
4. Train them on goal setting, giving directions, instilling company values, and assessing ways to further develop their teams.
5. Teach them to be sensitive to each employee’s need to learn and develop a career path.
6. Monitor your managers for communication frequency and to see what they are actually saying.
7. Measure productivity and turnover rates against the rest of the management team, but be open to the differences between one department or team and another.

Managers are the foundation of your growing organization, so develop them, and they will do the same for their teams and your business.