Turn your managers into leaders

Andy Welsh

February 10, 2023

Does your organisation employ Managers or Leaders? Because there's a big difference.

While Managers may be competent at ticking off people’s work, Leaders will also be engaging and inspiring their team, having the right conversations at the right time, and asking how can we improve?

Supporting leaders with data

Now there might actually be some overlap between the two roles, but for many, being a leader doesn’t always come naturally. Quite often, those who end up in a position of responsibility have done so because they were once star players in the team. Just take a look at elite sport. Magic Johnson, Diego Maradona or Wayne Gretzky were phenomenal players that subsequently failed to lead their team to such great heights, after making the move into management.

But while in sports, the success of a leader can be easily assessed with the scoreboard each week, for almost everyone else, the task appears to be a little more difficult. How do we know which managers need our support and what areas of improvement do they need to focus on? Getting these regular, real-time insights on something like team leadership sounds pretty tough right? Wrong!

One of the most powerful use cases for Teamgage, is that it allows you to use data (not just gut feel) to actually measure how well managers are leading their team.

This comes through, not just in the real-time scores for each metric or the team comments themselves, but also within the gold mine of additional Teamgage activity data we measure and benchmark for each team.

For example:

Is a leader fostering an environment where a high number of Teamgage comments per submission are generated? A great marker of how well someone is inspiring everyone in their team to share their own ideas for improvement.
Is a leader holding meetings with their team? A benchmark of how often a leader brings their team into the process of improvement in an open and honest way.
Is a leader creating and then closing lots of team actions in response to team results? An indicator of team energy and of a leader that's always looking to change and improve things with their team.

Having data-driven discussions to help managers lead

If we’re asking team managers to share Teamgage results with their teams, it’s important you do the same, to identify the areas where your managers need to improve to become better leaders. Let's really put that Teamgage benchmark report to work!

A great real-world example of how to do this comes from Luke Havelberg, CIO at Flinders University. He’s been using Teamgage since 2020 and regularly works with his leaders and their teams to generate significant improvements across his division.

In a recent interview with Teamgage, Luke explained how easy this is to do:

“Importantly when I have my one-to-ones with leaders, as I did this week, I sat down with a leader, got out their trending chart for their dials for the last 12 months and we could see that Communication has been trending down for the year. It’s in a space that's relative to the rest of the teams in the division, but it’s well below everyone else. So the conversation isn’t “how’s your team going” and they go “yeah, alright.” It’s “I can see your Communication dial is trending down, I can see some of the comments coming through, why do you think this is, what actions are you taking to remediate it? So then you have a KPI there that’s helping you understand whether things are trending back in the right direction. ”

4 steps to help your Managers turn into Leaders

So what’s next?

We’d recommend the following 4 steps to start really moving the dial in team leadership:

Review your current assessment process
Include engagement with Teamgage results and actions created
Communicate this with your managers
Ensure all department leaders have access to Benchmark reports

Remember, the main aim for reviewing Teamgage results with a team manager is to help them gain the most from all of the valuable insights generated and help them become a better leader.

Remind them that it’s only through identifying areas of strength and weakness, gaining insights into employee perceptions and setting KPIs for improvement, that the organisation will gain a more positive and productive team environment.