Mirror mirror - who is the fairest manager of them all?

The spring 2012 edition of the CIPD Employee Outlook survey makes for interesting reading.  (cipd.co.uk/employeeoutlook).    Taking into account the views of nearly 2000 employees, there are some optimistic signs and also some seemingly contradictory data.  Attitudes to immediate managers appear to be positive and improving, although senior managers are less well regarded.  Contact with immediate managers, especially when the context is the employee's self-development, feedback on their performance or simple praise are correlated with employee engagement, yet these seem to be the topics that managers talk about the least, when meeting with their staff.  More interesting is the difference in perceptions that managers and employees hold when expressing the level of satisfaction with the manager.  80% of  managers think that their employees are satisfied (or better) with their manager - only 58% of employees agree.  Again, the report highlights the correlation between satisfaction with manager and employee engagement. And yet, 62% of respondents rate 'people management skills' as very important as part of their role (women more so than men).

So what's going on?  Managers seem to think that they talk to their people, and at some level, intellectually they understand that focusing on the individual is an important aspect of getting performance, but do they actually do it?  Or is it that employees either expect too much, or perhaps don't recognise that sometimes a conversation can have multiple purposes? For example, explaining task objectives can also be an opportunity for coaching and development.  One of the issues when coaching is that if you are inviting the coachee to think about 'content' they are unlikely simultaneously be thinking about 'process'.  In short, they may not know, or be interested in, what the boss is doing.  Even further, there are so many different definitions of coaching that it would be easy to understand that managers and employees actually have different opinions of when they are/are not being coached.

Trust doesn't seem to be the issue; what scores lowest is the level of consultation and the amount of coaching which occurs.  It's easy to see how these things diminish in tough times, when time is tight, demands are high and workforces are depleted.  

I wonder if managers need more help in the specific language that they use, when interacting with their employees, so that they talk about the things that make the biggest difference.  Part of this may be making more explicit the level of consultation, facilitation and development activities so that employees actually feel that they are involved in the process, that their personal contribution and their own development actually matters.

The report concludes that 'efforts to improve employee engagement will be fatally undermined unless employers place an emphasis on building management capability at all levels.  Increasingly this is about leadership skills rather than management.....leadership tends towards the more emotional aspects of helping people to deliver and is more closely tied to individual personality and authenticity'.