Managers are Unhappy, What Should Executives Do?
- Philip Schentrup
- Aug 22
- 5 min read
Updated: Sep 4
The Wall Street Journal recently published a few articles on the topic of managers being unusually unhappy. In fact, in one article they cited a Gartner study indicating only 27% of managers feel engaged and enthusiastic about their work[1]. That means almost three quarters of managers aren’t feeling any love for what they do. What should executives and senior managers do to build a strong and healthy management culture?
I am a big believer in teams winning by being great at blocking and tackling. One of the fundamentals to a strong management culture is to understand how many direct reports managers have. While a manager might have responsibility for a large organization of 100s of people, they should still have 10 or fewer direct reports[2],[3]. Right sizing the number of direct reports a manager has ensures they have the bandwidth to focus on the right issues at the right times and have routine and meaningful dialogues with their reports. In fact, according to the WSJ[1], most managers feel overwhelmed, and team size can be a significant contributing factor. Conversely, if a manager has a very small team or 1-3 people, consider consolidating teams by transitioning managers of small teams to leads[4] instead of managers.
While it is important to focus on right-sizing the number of reports a manager has, don’t let a desire to limit direct reports create a bloated and overly complex management layer. Mark Zuckerberg recently published a letter to Meta employees extolling “flatter is faster” and “leaner is better”[5]. He is right! (But this isn’t new, people have known this for generations.) Having the right number of managers neither requires an increase in the number of management levels nor a bloating of managers. In fact, it usually reduces the number of managers in a company.
After ensuring managers have been reasonably loaded with direct reports, mentor managers to engage with their teams. Right sizing the number of direct reports a manager has creates the space and opportunity for them to engage with reports, but mentoring and management culture ensures the engagement happens. In fact, one of the key findings of the Gartner report is that managers aren’t feeling engaged by their managers. The essence of management is connection with, and mentoring of, your reports. This requires managers to engage with their reports routinely. Establishing good engagement and communication practices of managers is perhaps the most important thing executives can do. Engagement by managers makes the whole team more satisfied and productive. According to Gallup, 42% of employee turnover is preventable by improved management interaction with team members[6].
Ensuring management is the right fit for an individual is also crucial. Senior managers must sit down with as many of their existing managers as possible and discuss their career goals and what gets them excited about the job. In many companies, individuals take management roles either because they believe it is the only way to advance in their career or because it was expected of them. There are many individuals in this group for whom management is not a good fit. Executives must make sure that their organization has a viable and respected path for growth that does not involve management. For example, in technical organizations there is usually an individual contributor path reporting up through VP or CTO level. Allowing highly skilled, high achievers to have a non-management path is good for both the company and individuals for whom management does not appeal. As with any advanced role, the role should generate multipliers that justify its existence and compensation. In some cases, after discussing opportunities with individuals, it is clear that they would prefer to return to non-management roles, and that is a win.
Once people have found the right roles for themselves, don’t assume going forward your best developers will make good managers. The things that make a developer good can make them poor managers. For example, a good developer knows how to single-task and maintain focus. A good manager knows how to multi-task well and focus attention where needed. Also, a good developer may have limited communication skills, while a good manger requires great communication skills.
Mentoring is also fundamental to a strong management culture. This can be in the form of outside mentoring (a.k.a. training) or personal mentoring. One would think this would be a self-reinforcing benefit. Helping a direct report improve their game should help improve the performance of the team and increase their satisfaction. Sadly, few managers take the time needed to build the trust and rapport needed for a mentoring relationship. Building a strong management culture, means building strong managers. Investments in training and mentoring are critical for building and maintaining a high-performance organization. It is no surprise that Gartner found that mentoring and training led to up to a 22% increase in job satisfaction for managers.
Finally, there are a couple of other factors that are weighing on managers, recent restructurings and AI. Both factors are critical for many businesses and are intertwined. These topics deserve their own discussion, however, and I’ll cover them in a future post.
Good managers are value multipliers. By investing in a strong management culture, executives increase the multiples of their managers. As in most things, the difference between winning and losing comes down to a focus on fundamentals.
Tips and Techniques
Right-size the number of reports managers have.
Select managers for their knowledge, soft skills, and desire to manage individuals rather than seniority or narrow technical skills.
Build a strong management culture by ensuring that all managers build trust and rapport with team members.
Provide managers mentoring and training to help them understand how to increase their value multipliers at every stage of their career.
[2] There are many factors that contribute to how many direct reports a manager should have including experience of the manager, experience of the reports, independence of reports, etc.
[3] The number of people a person can manage varies by their experience, so never expect an inexperienced manager to directly manage 10 people. If you do, you are likely creating bad habits in a young manager and denying their reports the opportunity for good management.
[4] The distinction between a lead and manager in this context is that a lead has responsibility for guiding resources on functional issues (e.g. technical input) but does not have responsibility for people management. Giving individuals the chance to be a lead before managing people give both the individual and the company a chance to assess the individuals interpersonal skills and is a good stepping stone to manager.
