The conversation took place years ago, but I still remember it well.
I was a young manager then and felt management was plenty difficult. I was attending an in-house management seminar on "employee attitudes" - a precursor to employee engagement. During a break the HR executive who had organized the seminar and I were talking - she was far more experienced than I, and I was eager to pick her brain about some of the challenges of management.
"Well, you don't have to worry too much," she said to me. "You're a good manager." Her comment surprised me. At that stage of my career I was still learning to deal more directly with conflict and performance-related issues, and didn't feel at all competent at it. "Why do you say that?" I asked - not fishing for a compliment so much as curious to understand what she considered the elements of good management. To this day, decades later, I still remember her five-word answer.
"You talk to your people," she said.
When I asked her what exactly she meant by that, she added: "I've seen how you relate to them - you communicate with them, you have some idea what's going on with them."
"You mean a lot of managers don't?" I asked.
"You'd be surprised," she said.
It was only much later that I came to understand her comments more fully. I realized: Over the years I never met a manager who wasn't a good communicator. It's a foundational management skill. But of course, you might say, that's just common sense. Indeed it is. But as I often say: When it comes to management, just because something is common sense doesn't mean it's commonly practiced.
Don't just take it from me - there's a nice concise description from an article last year in Harvard Business Review that gets at the core importance of basic nuts-and-bolts everyday communication. The piece is titled What Great Managers Do To Engage Employees, by James Harter and Amy Adkins.
Extensive Gallup research, they write, finds "that engagement is highest among employees who have some form (face-to-face, phone, or digital) of daily communication with their managers. Managers who use a combination of face-to-face, phone, and electronic communication are the most successful in engaging employees. And when employees attempt to contact their manager, engaged employees report their manager returns their calls or messages within 24 hours."
In short, nothing fancy, just reliable normal communication. Be available to talk and provide guidance when needed, and return messages efficiently and respectfully.
In the inherently stressful world of employee-manager relations, small things make a big difference. Over the years I learned that simple communication one can count on goes a long way to building manager-employee rapport. And rapport builds trust... trust builds engagement... and engagement yields productivity.
If as a manager you really don't like communicating with your people, you're probably in the wrong business.
As that HR executive first opened my eyes to years ago, the best managers - always - communicate.
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Victor is author of The Type B Manager: Leading Successfully in a Type A World.
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