Read more
Introduction It’s 3:21 on a Wednesday afternoon in San Francisco. Marta Romero walks back to her office from one of her many meetings-- exhausted. She has nine minutes before her next meeting with one of her direct reports, Jon Goldberg, who has been having trouble with one of his projects. He is working on launching a new development application. Romero takes a deep breath and exhales-- she has been out of the weeds of development for a while and doesn’t have the new technical knowledge to help him. She glances at her list of On any given day around the globe the plight of today’s managers mirrors Romero’s. Urgent tasks take precedence over an ever-expanding list of expectations and demands. To‑do items, including coaching responsibilities, become “as if” wish lists-- and the world spins madly on. Something has to give, but what? In many instances, like Romero’s, the coaching and feedback interactions managers would Until now, Romero’s trajectory has been successful. Having climbed the ranks of her midsize technology company, from individual software developer to manager of a thirty-person team, Romero knows that a key to her own success is helping her team become more self-sufficient. She also knows that some work is just easier to do herself than pass along to others, even if it means that emerging tasks have to wait on the back burner until she has the time to get more involved. On a good day, Romero serves as the heart of her team, firing on all cylinders as a subject-matter expert and adviser to her employees. On a bad day, she leaves the office feeling guilty for failing to provide the guidance her employees need. As research and advisory leaders at Gartner, we spend hundreds of hours every year speaking with senior executives globally, and we continually hear that manager development is a top priority. We know that the effectiveness of managers has a huge impact on employee performance, engagement, and business results across organizations of all sizes, industries, and geographies--and companies are making significant investments to elevate manager preparedness through training, coaching, and technology. In reality, regardless of these investments, our data consistently show that managers simply don’t have what they need to succeed in today’s fast-moving, ever- evolving environment. But that’s not the complete story. In our work, we also see managers around the globe struggling to “be everything to everyone.” As employees’ jobs become more complex and challenging, so too do managers’ roles. As managers, we feel this ourselves. Organizations are changing quickly, technology is altering how we collaborate with our globally dispersed teams, and the skills we need to lead our teams are changing fast. Employees feel unprepared and they are demanding more from their managers and their organizations. And ...
