How line managers play a massive role in the success of your company.

If you ask 100 business leaders what’s the most important contributor to their overall success, you’re liable to get a wide range of answers. For some, it’s all about exceptional product or service development, while others will tell you that it’s all about marketing.

Others still will make a claim for brilliantly honed processes and systems, or a serious focus on innovation or customer satisfaction. But leaving personal opinion aside, research tells us time and again that the answer is a lot more singular – it’s to do with the effectiveness of managers. Not just senior management, C-suite management, but the entire body of managers across the entire company.

While it’s comforting to get this sort of clarity and focus, the fact that managers contribute so much to a company’s success raises a few rather worrying concerns and a huge missed opportunity. And here’s why. In many cases, good line managers are under-supported, under-trained and under-tooled. So, at a stage in their career, learning and development where they’re most in need of guidance and mentoring, they’re frequently left to work it out as they go along.

Here at Frankli, our mission is to unleash maximum people potential and to enable great performance at various levels of management throughout the organisation. So how can we help address some of the issues faced by line managers – and how can we stack the deck in their favour? Our performance management platform can transform the daily life of an individual manager in the following ways:‍

Employee Development.

We strongly believe that every time the human resource team department hire, you should be asking yourself how the new team member can rise to the very top. And while the newcomer may not be ready for greatness on Day 1, the leaders of tomorrow are only created with regular feedback and coaching or mentoring that’s specifically tailored to the role or sector of the new hire.

The obvious coaches are their immediate line managers, but asking them to act in this important role can be expensive in terms of time commitment, as there’s simply no shortcut to developing talent to its full potential. However, with a platform like Frankli, managers can develop team members with minimal time input, but without the risk of missing out on some of the key learning objectives.

Our platform enables line managers to capture all the numerous conversations – both big and small – that feed into an effective coaching or mentorship relationship. They also make it particularly easy to set clear expectations – and to measure progress against those expectations.

This has always been important, but with so many people now working from home or via a hybrid model, it’s more difficult than ever to stay in regular contact with team members, so a software approach makes more sense than ever. ‍

Performance management.

For busy line managers, growing high-performing teams demands a combination of continuous feedback, 1:1s, agile goal setting and flexible performance reviews. And as this is a huge job on paper, and these management skills  places enormous demands on team leaders and managers who typically are time-poor and are pulled in many directions at the same time.

Software like Frankli automates the tasks for them and means that even the most ambitious performance management objectives can be easily met. This is particularly important when they’re charged with taking ownership of new hires, and when the onus of coaching and training tends to be at its heaviest.‍

Employee Engagement.

Today more than ever, the employee is king - and queen!. There has never been such a demand for talent, and in many cases, the bigger international brands hoover up the lion’s share on offer. This is not to say that smaller companies can’t win, however.

Time and time again, employee surveys tell us that financial incentives and size of paycheque are not the only incentives that works for them. People like to be loved, and find it difficult to walk away from an organisation that puts their interests first – particularly when it comes to areas like training and development.

With a highly effective platform like Frankli, engagement is incredibly simple. You can understand what’s going on with people with powerful pulse surveys, check how likely they are to recommend the company to potential colleagues with eNPS or drill down into micro issues with regular custom polls.‍

People Analytics.

‍Team members like nothing better than having their performance reviewed or recognised and reacted to in real-time by the management team. This is super-easy with Frankli, and the net result is that you can make better and faster decisions based on data analytics from as many sources as you care to imagine.

This also means that decisions relating to performance levels of team members are based on hard realities rather than mere sentiment or guesswork.

The bottom line is that line managers play a massive role in the success of your company, but it’s unrealistic to expect them to excel unless they’re supported with the tools to succeed. By empowering them with software like Frankli, not only are they better prepared and better motivated to manage the performance levels of their teams, but they are also well on the way to become leaders in their own right, and stepping up to the next level in their career.

For further information on how Frankli can transform the daily life of an individual managers, feel free to get in touch here.