How to improve people management skills across your business

According to the Chartered Managers Institute (CMI), 98% of managers and 95% of directors in the UK believe enhancing management and leadership skills is critical to improving organisational performance.

CMI report that ‘the UK faces a management and leadership skills crisis’, having lagged behind other G7 countries on leadership capability for many years now. This leadership crisis is a major driver of the UK’s long-standing ‘productivity deficit’. Likewise, this shortfall in people management skills is likely a major contributor to the UK’s poor engagement rate, in turn driving turnover. As one recent study found, 43% of employees in the UK have left their job because of a poor manager.

Improving the standard of your managers could be instrumental to navigating today’s big challenges, like hybrid working and the looming recession. Let’s look at how to improve people management skills across your business. 

What are people management skills?

People management skills refer to the skills needed to manage people effectively, like communication skills, empathy and self-awareness. They typically refer to soft skills rather than technical hard skills, although technical capability is often an important facet of leaders’ credibility.

SME business owner and executive coach Nicola Richardson explains:

‘One of the most important attributes a leader can possess is being trustworthy. But what builds trust? An important part of trust is credibility. As a leader, do you set an example for your team? Do you inspire confidence that you’ll get the job done and get it done the right way?’

Both hard skills and soft skills, then, are important for credibility. To lead from the front, your managers should be technically adept as well as possess the soft skills to manage their team well.

That said, it’s easier to miss the mark when promoting or hiring for soft skills because they’re by nature less quantifiable. As Business News Daily summarises: ‘You can generally measure work product resulting from hard skills’ capabilities – for instance, the candidate either knows a computer program or does not.’

This has a knock-on impact on hiring, promotion and development decisions because it’s easier to prioritise skills you can tangibly measure. As the CIPD put it: ‘people still often get promoted into managerial roles based on their technical competence, rather than leadership skills and are therefore more likely to need support to become effective leaders.’

But leadership skills are equally critical to good leadership as technical skills. Perhaps more: the BBC report that soft skills are the most desired qualifications for 91% of management jobs.

HR industry expert and analyst Josh Bersin concurs: ‘the biggest gaps are not digital skills but behavioural skills.’ Bersin refers to people management skills as ‘power skills’, ‘because in reality they are the skills that give you real “power” at work’. He talks about how the conversation has shifted among executives:

‘CEOs and business leaders are now realizing that they can “buy” these technical skills (or build them internally, at ever-lower cost) relatively easily. It’s the soft skills or “power skills” that take effort.’

IBM talk about how this shift reflects the evolution of the digital world of work, away from ‘structured, process-orientated [and] top-down’ organisational thinking, towards fluidity and flexibility:

‘Different management styles are required – ones that encourage an agile work environment that includes autonomous decision making, work product iteration, experimentation, peer-to-peer coaching, and flexible team structures. Essentially, cultures and organisational competencies need to shift to reflect these new ways of working and facilitate the training and conditioning of a workforce with new skills.’

This shift is even more evident post-pandemic. For instance, a 2021 report from the Global Alliance in Management Education (CEMS) found a significant increase in employees’ asking for softer management skills from leaders.

CEMS report that 38% of employees expected their leader to show empathy and emotional intelligence before the pandemic, compared to 43% post-pandemic. That’s an increase of 14%. Likewise, before the pandemic only 13% of employees wanted leaders to show resilience compared to 43% afterwards – almost three times as many.

If improving ‘soft’ people leadership skills wasn’t already an urgent imperative for business leaders, it seems to be becoming one. Now the big question is, how?

How to improve people management skills in your leaders

‘Developing managers so that they can perform effectively is a particularly crucial part of wider organisational learning strategies’, the CIPD say. But it’s also an area of growth opportunity for most businesses, as only 40% of employers have initiatives to improve managers’ people skills. 

Here are some guidelines to help your managers and leaders develop strong people management skills:

• Identify learning needs. There’s no single agreed list of skills that make for effective people management, so an effective learning programme won’t be one-size-fits-all. The CIPD recommend you conduct a capability analysis, which is a ‘clear, systematic and ongoing identification of how learning and development (L&D) needs relate to performance gaps’.
• Start early. Globally recognised analyst, author, speaker and brand strategist Megan M. Biro points out that the Gen Z hires you’re meeting now are tomorrow’s leaders. Give your earliest hires the support and coaching to grow into the managers you need.
• Take a theoretical step back. When you’re building a leadership development programme, it can be helpful to start by choosing the leadership models that best suit your organisation.
• Look to recruitment too. Skills training isn’t the only piece of the manager development puzzle. It’s also about who you bring into the business in the first place. There are many recruitment tools designed to assess leadership potential – this could be a worthwhile addition to your recruiting stack.
• Consider building a mentor programme. A good mentor/mentee relationship can be a productive way to pass on strong people management skills. You might think of mentoring for lower-level employees but it can also be invaluable for burgeoning managers.

Research shows that 40% of UK workers are unhappy with their leaders, less than any other European country studied. Statistics like this reinforce the urgency of fixing CMI’s ‘management and leadership skills crisis’ that we referred to at the outset of this article. Understanding how to improve people management skills among your leaders and aspiring leaders, then, can offer a real competitive advantage.