Name: The New Rules of Management: Why Manager Effectiveness Is HR’s New Competitive Advantage
Uploaded: 2026-08-25T18:30:11.102Z
Duration: 1 h 29 min 56 s
Description: The New Rules of Management: Why Manager Effectiveness Is HR’s New Competitive Advantage

Transcript for "The New Rules of Management: Why Manager Effectiveness Is HR’s New Competitive Advantage": Hello. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the new rules of management, why manager effect effectiveness is HR's new competitive advantage. We're so excited to have you here and join us for our session today. As we get started, we're just gonna wait a few minutes while other folks join. Some of you have already gotten started on this. So while we wait for just a few minutes, go ahead and drop in where you're joining us from. We can find out if we have any neighbors among us. And if you wanna write in a word about how your week is going, we can put that in there too, maybe even emoji. I'll share. I am joining from Columbus, Ohio. I saw another Ohio joiner with us today. And, my word for the week, I think, is relief. I don't know if anyone else has had drain flies or fruit flies the way I have had them. It's disgusting, but I think I've almost got all the dead bodies with my apple cider booby traps. So I'm very excited about it calming down. So cool to see everyone from all over the place. Southern California. Oh, I'm from Southern California. And another Ohioan. Look at this, Midwest rep representing. I love it. Very, very cool. Let's go Buckeyes. Yeah. But I will admit, my family is from Michigan, so it is a very complicated relationship that I have in my household. Alright. So that was probably long pause enough. These panel discussions, I think, are so fun, because we get to just be so much more conversational and involve everyone who's joining in the discussion. So as we move through this, feel free to please add your comments, any reactions or thoughts in the chat, and we can help bounce ideas off of each other. And if you've got any follow-up questions to anything I'll be asking our guest speakers today, on the right hand side next to the chat is a q and a section of that panel. Please put your questions in there. I will do my very best to address them as we go through this, but we also might have time at the end to go through your questions. And if we can't, we'll still, I promise, find ways to be able to address them whether it's in future themes of sessions or LinkedIn articles, whatever the case is, but we wanna make sure that we get all of your questions answered and and really hit on the content that matters most to you. We also are gonna be running polls throughout our session. So we've got a wizard behind the scenes. His name is David, and he will be helping to navigate our slides today and launching our polls. So when you see those polls pop up, please just respond. I'll read through them, but respond through them so we can capture your thoughts and your opinions as we go through this. Alright. So let's jump into it. My name is Caitlin Collins. I am an organizational psychologist and the director of program strategy and outcomes here at Better Works. And I will be your moderator today for our panel discussion. I am joined by two amazing and experienced leaders who help organizations strengthen management, coaching, and performance in this, like, fast paced changing world that we find ourselves in within the workplace. So Erin and Kamaria, if you could join me on stage and I will introduce you. Erin Deruska is a senior HR consultant. She's a leadership coach and a facilitator at one digital. Erin, tell us a little bit about your background and the work that you do with leaders and managers today. Sure. So I have over twenty five years of experience, working mostly in startups. So working with leaders who maybe this is their first time, leading, and I love coaching people in that space. I also operate and run our manager training cohort series, which our last cohort kicks off tomorrow, and there's still space if anyone's interested. So you can always reach out to me about that or to look at 2027. And, yeah. I love, I'm a coach and I take that sort of, lens into my HR work as well. So I work as a fractional head of people for startups. Very, very cool. And I hear the feedback on your manager sessions is going so well. So something to follow-up on for sure. Thank you very much, Erin. Next, we have Kamaria Scott. She is the founder and chief performance strategist at Enatek. Kamaria, tell us a little bit about your background and the management and performance challenges that you help organizations solve. Absolutely. So, yes, my name is Camarina Scott. I'm an ion psychologist. I'm also a performance strategist. And so I over the years, I have worked in HR and have looked after people leader populations in one of my organizations. I looked after 7,000 managers and their development and performance. And so I help organizations sort of clean the space around their managers. I always say we send them to development. It's like putting them through a car wash, but then we dip them back in the same dirty water, the environment, the the policies, all the things around them. So I help take a systems approach to improving people leader performance, and I help them to make sure that their managers can push their strategies forward. Oh, I love that analogy. I'm gonna steal that from you. That's really funny. Yeah. It's my favorite one. to use. Yeah. I love it. I love something creative. Thank you both so much. I'm really excited for us to dig into your perspectives on our topic today. We see that organizations are investing so heavily in technology, AI, workforce transformation. But the thing that, like, the hitch and the giddyo about those investments is that it still depends on managers to be able to translate strategy into day to day executions. The managers are being asked to align priorities, coach employees, navigate so much change, and make really good talent decisions often with less time, larger spans of control, and systems that were built for yesterday's processes versus the way we need them to work tomorrow. So today, we're gonna explore what has changed, what effective managers need from HR, and where organizations can be been begin making the job much more achievable, kind of lower the the barrier for entry on what that looks like. So we're gonna get started with our questions. Erin, I'm gonna start with you. Looking across the managers even in taking into consideration the trainings that you've rolled out, but looking across managers you've worked with, what has changed most about the job of managing people, do you Yeah. I think the biggest thing that I see is that ex employees expect more of their managers than? they ever have before. So they expect fairness and empathy and clear communication. They want context. I always like to say that in the absence of information, people are gonna make up their own story, and it is normally not a positive one. So making sure that the the managers are getting ahead of that and sharing the information, sharing the why behind decisions that are that are being made, especially if the decisions are impacting that employee. Again, I. work with a lot of startups, and so they're they're pivoting and changing pretty rapidly And so making sure that people understand why something is happening is super important. I also think that, you know, people wanna feel heard. You know? So even if you can't take their suggestion, they wanna at least know you took it into consideration. I was talking to some people recently, and they were saying, you know, my manager asked me, but it feels performative. Like, they feel like they've made the decision already. And so it's really about making sure that you are you know, if you're just seeking, like, an opinion, like, letting them know, like, this is what I I do want your opinion, or I'm gonna make this decision, but I wanna hear from you first, or I've already made the decision. It makes a big difference in how people feel. Like, if you just led with, hey, I've already made this decision, Probably not the best approach, but at least people could get on board with, like, okay. Well, at least you didn't just ask me for my opinion for nothing. Right. And so I think that old model of, you know, sort of do as I say doesn't work anymore. So if. managers are still operating in that framework of, like, well, I'm the manager, so you do what I say, it's not it's not gonna fly. Yeah. And how what an impact that has on the rest of their teams downstream. Kamaria, do you have any specific moments where you see how old expectations of managers just can't keep up with the pace of what needs to happen today? I I do, and I I think of it a little differently, actually. So I think that it's it's maybe not necessarily the expectations of the managers, but what's happening around the managers is changing. And so there's two examples that come to mind for me. One is that the relationship of work has changed. And so I always say, like, work you pay for, but loyalty comes second or loyalty is is to pay for separately. So if we think about, like, the psychological contract that used to be in effect of, manner of people in their organizations, it was almost inherent that people were loyal to their organizations because of the psychological contract. But as we've seen, that's really started to erode. And so it's managers who are not the glue to the organization. If you look across organizations, you look across benefits, they're all the same. They they the experiences are flattening. And so the key differentiator for people is what's happening at the team level. So managers are really being asked to hold the space and fill in the gap of loyalty that basically used to be organization wide. I think the only thing that's really changing for managers is how work is getting done. So as we all know, we are in the middle of an AI revolution, and that is changing how work gets done, but it's also changing how people think and how they perform. And so, Ben Eubanks, who you all may know, is just brilliant, just reposted a study about how even those students are using AI, they're finishing faster, but they're doing more poorly on their tests. And. so those people are gonna be employees one day that managers now have to manage. And so a responsibility that managers have now is not only to make sure the work gets done, but to also be looking after the actual development and growth and the ability of their employees to learn and perform with these changes that are coming. So there's a lot happening in the world of, like, managers right now in relationship to work, but also how the work is getting done. Yeah. And what that comes in the future. I think it's so interesting applying these you know, as generations come up the digital mindset and how you think and now the AI mindset about how the next generation thinks. What an interesting perspective to bring to that. Where do you see Kamara, I'm a stay here with you on a minute because I wanna connect this to business performance on what we're seeing. So kind of based on why the role feels different and what you're sharing, where do you feel that managers make the biggest difference to business performance? So one of my favorite sayings is every strategy thrives or dies in the hands of a people leader, and that is just a fact. So when I used to, work for a very large grocery store chain, our COO said, you know, I want us to to walk every guest to the door. We were rolling out a warm and friendly guest hospitality, approach to gaining customer share. And so and so the first thing I had to do was run down to a store and talk to and talk to the store directors, the managers, because every strategy has to come to light at their level. And so without them, it's really impossible for anything to action. I worked with another organization that was rolling out an employee listening tool. Right? They were wanting to put a listening strategy in place. Where they break down, the managers weren't using their tools, and therefore, there was no listing and no action taking. So there really is no strategy without managers, to be honest with you. And I think that is has always been the case, but I love now that there's more of a shift in focus and realization of the role that they play and an appreciation for taking care of them is taking care of the business and its performance. Yeah. 100%. I see that shift. I also see, like, on on opposite ends of a spectrum where we're trying we want to ideally move managers from a compliance based take order takers in an inconsistent practice across their business to, like, a talent multiplier where we're trying to accelerate potential, identify skill gaps and risks earlier. And so I think in that shift that you're talking about, where, come Erin, where do you feel that HR should hold managers accountable, and where do you think that or where do you think managers what do you think managers should receive as support in return from HR? Like, what. does that mean, I sure. And I love that. And I love, Camry, what you're saying of, like, the managers, the especially back to the loyalty that you were talking about, like, where does that come from? I think the managers have such an important role that maybe they don't realize how much of an impact they actually have. And so from an HR perspective, I always like to say that managers, they're defacto HR essentially for their employees. Right? They're the ones that are interacting with their employees on a day to day basis. They're seeing them more than HR does. And so they have more of an impact than policies, procedures, you know, processes. And so where I think managers and where HR can help support managers is in, how do we give better feedback to our employees? How do we empower the managers to have those difficult conversations? How do we train them but then have them actually use it? Because that's what I heard you say, Camari. It's like, oh, they have the tools. They weren't using them. So how do we reinforce the tools or just the the skills? One of the things I like to do with the leaders that I I support is say, hey. Listen. Like, I'll help role play this with you. Like, let's talk, you know, let's talk it through. But they're the ones that need to have those conversations. Often, I think they wanna give it to HR because it's like, I don't wanna have this difficult conversation. It's uncomfortable. No. Like, that's part of the role, and it's part of HR's role to help support you and help you feel comfortable having those conversations. Because as employees, you don't wanna be caught off guard that, like, oh, I never knew that I wasn't performing. Had I known, I could have changed my behavior, but instead, I. didn't know and I kept doing the thing I was doing. I I like to believe that people don't wake up and go, I'm gonna mess up today at work, that they really want to come in and do a good job. And so if they're given that opportunity to know that maybe, like, something needs to be course corrected, then it doesn't even become a big issue. But helping support the managers, helping them see the importance of giving that feedback and and not saying, oh, oh, I don't have time. Yeah. to. I totally agree. do, we. all we all blind spots that we need called out and time to be able to fail before we succeed to establish those. Such a great perspective. I'm gonna jump us into our very first poll, David, if you wouldn't mind launching that for us. So I think we are making a really good case, if we needed to about that managers matter a whole heck of a lot in our organization. So let's take a moment to get a high level read on how organizations, with everyone that's joining us today are prioritizing their manager effectiveness. So the question in the poll is how would you describe your organization's focus on improving manager effectiveness over the next twelve months? And your options are it's a top priority. It's something you already have underway. It's a high priority. You're starting to plan it. It is important, but we don't have a defined initiative yet. We are in the early stages of exploring this topic where it's not currently a priority for us right now. So I'll give you just a moment to respond. Alright. So our number one is it's a top priority and an initiative is really underway. I think it's a really overseeing that increase as more people are responding. I think it's a really positive perspective and sees where we're putting this or how our organization is attributing it to even our strategy overall. I'm gonna throw this over to you, Kamaria and Erin. Do you does this match with what you're seeing in organizations that you work with? It is. I again, I I think that more and more organizations are realizing how important managers are to any strategy they wanna have. And so I'm seeing them either try, you know, bringing the learning in house. I'm seeing them think about how they can create communities for their or managers to learn from each other. So there's a lot of efferenceing underway in various ways that are very exciting. Yeah. And I agree. I think it's it's tough, and especially because I work with smaller companies, might not have the budget to do things too. And so it's just, it's all it's it's always, top of mind and always deprioritized sometimes. I love that. Always, sometimes. Isn't that the truth about HR projects? Amazing. Thank you everyone for responding to our first poll. Let's talk about strains, and what reality for managers feels like on their side of the coin. So, Erin, where do you feel the manager role or managers are really experiencing the most challenges or the most strains in their jobs today? Yeah. And, again, I I will keep saying this because I do work with smaller businesses and start. ups, and there's always time and resource constraints. Right? And so we're trying to grow employees, but also retain them. But sometimes we don't have the traditional levers of, you know, wrap you know, there might be the ability to promote, but it might not you know, there might not be a a lot of opportunity to grow upward right away. We might not have bonuses in place. You know, we might be constrained in salary increases, and so those are sometimes things that people want. So it's like how do you then help to continue to engage them and grow them without that? Because we know those things are nice, but they're not the things that actually help people. And so how do we get managers who feel time constrained and under a lot of pressure to meet deadlines? So then they deprioritize the employee development, and then their employees feel stagnant. You know, this is typically what I see. So there's a disconnect between what employees want, which is, like, I want growth. I wanna know how I can grow and and, and be better. And then managers being like, oh, I don't have time because we have all these deadlines, and we have to get these things done. So that's. where I see that strain coming into play. Kamaria, do you see anything different or in addition to? Yeah. I I think I would I would add to that probably. So I think part of the strength of being a people leader is that you have four jobs. Right? So first and foremost, you are a team leader. You are the person who is looking after the care of your particular team. You're also an individual contributor. So we went to player coach models, you know, years ago, and so no one I know manages the team only. Everyone has their own deliverables. You're also an admin person. So anything HR throws over the fence. I love us. I'm an HR girl. But the number of times I was in HR and we said, well, the managers can do it, we add to that layer. And then you are a de facto project manager. So kind of like Erin, I've worked with, you know, organizations of all sizes. And when you get to, like, enterprise, you get the luxury of having an assigned project manager. Until then, you are the person making sure those projects are on time, on budget, and all your stakeholders are happy. So when you take one role and you shove four different responsibilities into it, it creates really a difficult opportunity or a different experience for them because I do find that they want to do a good job. The thing that I would add to that is and, again, I'm gonna echo what Erin said, is that a lot of the means to the things that we want them to do have not been established. And so if we say develop your employees, but there are no career paths. They're in a development plan. Right? So now we're starting to get into, like, having them fill in the gaps, and I think that really is hard for them. So I think, you know, managers, I do think they wanna do a really good a good job, but we perhaps have not set them up for success. And I think. the other part I would add one more thing to that is being aware. We're often not aware of the downstream effects of our decisions on managers. Again, being in HR early, I have been in more spans and layers conversations than I care to count. And so when we say and I think I think even you all posted something from Gallup about, like, the number of people that managers are now starting to have to manage. Well, how good of a manager can I be if I'm now managing, like, 15 people when, you know, good science tells us five to eight is the magic number? So those are the places where I'm starting to see strain in managers is those downstream effects combined with the four roles they have to play. Yeah. I've seen even though they're on our own customer base spans of control increasing. I mean, we work with organizations where it's up between, like, fifty and three hundred. And it is just like, for me to even wrap my own head around it and is is really hard when you're right. The ideal the ideal number is so much smaller than that. Yeah. Where do you think Kamaria, I'm just gonna follow-up on this. Where do you feel like those gaps could be addressed by better systems or processes of accountability or maybe changes in role design? What do you think the answer to some of that might So I oh, this I love this question so much. So I think there's there's three things. Right? I I think first, role design is so important. What do we really think the role of a manager is? Because, be? like, I see it as a manager is like a relationship manager. The same way you have, like, a a relationship manager with your customers, your manager is your relationship manager with your or with your employees. So if you think about it like that, then it begs the question of, like, well, how much time are you allowing them to manage the relationship, and how easy are you making it to do that? So I think that's one area. I think the other is, I use an assessment that I call the will, the skill, and the way, and it helps me to identify where, like, manage performance is breaking down. And one of them is the way. It's technology. We have amazing technology that can start to do some of the administrative things, that can help manage the relationships. So helping them to do some of the things so that everything is not manual. I mean, I won't call any names, but people are still using spreadsheets for things that we do have technology to do. Old habits are hard to break, Maria. So there's that. Right? So I think it's it's like looking for those friction points Yeah. and then saying, how do we ease those friction points so they can spend their time in the relationship space? And then also, you know, taking care of the actual work itself, that would be the best thing we can do. Yeah. And I. feel like related to that is, like, having finding meaning in what they're doing so that they don't feel like it's a check the box activity. Because because I think when they feel it's like something like, oh, I have to do this, check the box, it doesn't have that same impact on the employees. So we. have to, like, also redesign from the perspective of, like, is this providing value? Yeah. And if it's not, get rid of it. I'm. a big. fan of just cleaning and throwing stuff away. Like, let's spring clean our own performance processes. Yeah. I love that. You made you mentioned technology, and I think that I agree I agree on all these points, but I think that it can relieve some pressure. I think that sometimes there is an assumption where it might overtake or do too much. But, really, the the perspective I take on this is that even though it can help relieve some of that pressure and and solve for those gaps, it also changes how the manager participates in what they need to own. So I'm gonna shift that straight into our next question for AI, and really under trying to understand, like, what is the right balance between AI support and human judgment? What does that look like for managers in making sure that we maintain the human part to reduce the administrative burden? Kamaria, I'll start with you. Sorry. I forgot to say your name. No worries at all. So I think that human judgment is is so important. Like, I don't think there's any sort of AI that's gonna that should try to replace you knowing your team better than than the manager does. But when I think about some of the tasks that managers have to do, I think those are the things that could be supported. So whether it's helping to automate some of the communications that need to, let's say, automate some of the communications that need to take place or helping them to build their one to ones. So there's things that managers do have to do that they're doing manually that I think, like, I think technology can support that. And I also think that technology can support a shared view of what's happening. So, obviously, we have so much technology in all that we do. We should not have different views of what happened. Right? So, like, either it was turned in on time or it wasn't. That's not something we should be still talking about or the work was finished. So I think that technology can can gather the information that then helps a manager to make a decision. If we can start doing it for that purpose, then they're able to analyze it and say, well, what do I do now that I have all this information at my fingertips? I always say AI is basically just a collection of data. So if we're pulling it together and we're helping we're presenting it to managers, help them make decisions without having to search for different things. Give it to them with their fingertips, and it aids their conversations. It aids what they need to do. It aids their communications. So I think that's what we could do. Oh, yep. Like, Kamaria, what do you or sorry. Aaron, what what do you see for that? Is there a guardrails or any guidance that HR can provide to managers to help them be more confident in this? Or, you know, Yeah. what does that look like? Yeah. Honestly, what I like, you know, what Kamari was saying, like, related to, you know, helping them get things done or helping them sort of think about how they might wanna approach their employees, where I find it's it's been helpful for managers who have been given feedback that maybe their communication's harsh or that people misunderstand them or that their communication is not very clear, it can then help them have better communication with their employees. So, like, they can if there's somebody who has been told they're too harsh, then they can take that email, put it through AI, and ask it to soften it so that the person could hear it. It could be a thought partner to them to help them, like, figure out how to have these conversations or how to approach this. So I I really like seeing managers use it, like, as a thought partner and as a partner to kinda help them in the moment. Like, I can't always be there to tell you how to have that conversation, and so it allows them to have that sort of at their fingertips instead and and be able to be a more effective communicator if they take the feedback in the first place. Yeah. I love that. It doesn't and that makes you think doesn't that also then create neuroplasticity? Because you're learning and coaching yourself as you're moving through that. And and I think that also is an opportunity to further growth in your coaching style for different ways for different employees. Like, there's such a I I do that to my own self all the time, and I just find such a benefit out of checking myself before I send things out sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. Especially if you know you have some emotion to it because AI doesn't have emotion. Yep. And so. it's not gonna be in there. So, you know, it's it's definitely going to have a more neutral tone to it. Yeah. Yeah. I'm gonna pick on feedback on that, Erin. Let's stick on that for a second. And, because it is I don't think I'm alone in this. That is one of my favorite topics. It can be so powerful, but also so misused. What do you feel separates feedback that changes performance or really drives, like, growth and value from feedback that gets ignored? Yeah. Well, one, giving it, Okay. because, I often didn't feedback that. Okay. right? Actually, giving the feedback, because often I'll have conversations with managers and they're like, yeah. I told them that. I'm like, but did you? I was like, tell me tell me how you you know, tell me what you said. And it's like, oh, yeah. Then that's like, if that's what you actually said to the person, that wasn't feedback. It was real generalized or it was very watered down. So one of the things that I learned so I I did improvise theater for years, when I lived in California, and I had several teachers that used to talk about how specificity is what gets you with a laugh. It is what, like, people, you know, saying, like, oh, I went to Waffle House is different than saying I went out for breakfast. So that this so the same thing happens in feedback. The more specific we can give where we can give concrete examples because, again, the people might not be able to see that this was an issue for them. So if you you have to give them specific examples of where this is happening and why, not just sort of I don't like that. Well, what don't you like? But even on the other side, like, you did a good job today. Well, what did I do that was good? So it's not even, like, I'm trying to make sure that people understand, like, that specificity is helpful on both the positive and constructive feedback. And I had a departing employee, leaving to go back to school and was in the exit interview, and her biggest thing and I said, can I please use this? And she's like, yes, because I now use it in my training. She's like, I can't improve from fine. So if you if you're telling me I'm doing fine, I can't improve from that. Yeah. So I love classic? that little nugget, and I've been using it for the last year. I love it. Because that is what a common trap. I think that's one of the most common traps that people are you. doing? Fine. You're doing great. Yeah. Great. Okay. Alright. Camaria, well, how do you see that? Do you, let me here. I'll I'll pivot this just a little bit, but I wanna hang on on the feedback concept. You know, where organizations have been trying for a couple years and still gaining momentum in driving more real time feedback so that there's greater value out of this. But have you seen it applied to any of the organizations that you work with on how you make sure that continuous valuable feedback doesn't turn into an adoption or compliance exercise? Like, how do we drive this more regularly so that it is valuable versus a check. the box? So I I love that question because it it I might get a little rogue on this one. Okay. So I think first and foremost, we have to ask ourselves, like, what's the value of performance management and performance conversation? Right? I think when we think about performance management, and, again, I'm always gonna hold my own hand for this because I'm an HR girl too. I think we forget that the purpose of performance management is to create a win win scenario for the employee and the organization. And so to that end, any feedback that we give should be in the vein of how are you getting better for what you want and how are you getting better for what the organization needs. And that makes it a valuable conversation for everybody involved. So I always tell people I'm like the hair club president. I'm not only, like, you know, of the president. I'm also a member. Like, I have led teams, and what I will tell you is that every conversation around performance always starts with, I know you wanna do x, y, and z. I know you want to either get promoted. I know you want to be seen by a senior leader. I know you wanna x, y, and z. The conversation we're having is in the vein of what you want because taking care of today takes care of your tomorrow. So being able to have a real conversation that is of value to the employee for their own needs, their own dreams, their own aspirations, and connecting that to what the business wants to do. That is one, I think, the most thing that we often miss when we talk about performance. And when you do it that way, then people want it. They the employees want your feedback. They want that because they know that you're doing it and you're talking to them with their best interest in mind. I think we have to be so careful not to forget that work is a relationship. And I always again, I said, you know, managers are relationship managers to their employees. Part of what makes them feedback useful or people willing to take it is trust. Trust. that you have their best interest. So I can tell that my team members, I had one, one day and I was like, girl, are you AT and T today? Because you are phoning it in. And we both had a good laugh after that, but she knew, she knew that I knew that she could do better. And I was like, listen. I wanna I wanna I wanna elevate you, and I wanna put you in front of such and such senior leader, but I this is not it, sis. This is not that. And we again, we had to laugh, but it was received, and there was change. So I think we have to always be thinking about what's the win win and why are we doing this? Because back to Erin's point, if it's not adding value, no amount of process, technology, checkboxing is gonna make it better. It's gonna be an exercise to everybody involved. Yeah. You said something in there I wanna highlight is connecting it to the business per like a purpose. But I wanna expand on that a little bit too because I think it's so important that, yes, it has to add value so that in the moment that it means something is specific, but but connecting it to, like, a a growth. See, you know, as you said, I think it's meaningful to them, but it serves a greater purpose for the function for the business. You know, what is it contributing to in order to develop this skill or deliverable, whatever the case is? I really I love that so much. Well, thank you for that. We are going to launch our second poll. So, David, if you could put that up. Thank you, sir. So in talking about sources of strain, let's take a look for everyone in our session. What challenges are most prominent for everyone in your organizations who are joining us? So which best describes your biggest manager performance challenge today? Managers don't have time for meaningful conversations. Managers lack confidence or capabilities to coach. Performance conversations happen too late. We don't have a consistent approach across our teams, or our current approach is working quite well, actually. I hope that's the case for you. I. didn't do it. Alright. Oh, we so we've got some leaders coming in on the responses. So it looks like we've got our top one. We'll We'll see how this averages out in a moment. But managers lack confidence or capability to coach. Managers don't have time for meaningful conversations. Oh, that resonates so much with what I see across our organizations that we work with. Erin, what do you how does that align with what you see? Yeah. I mean, I think I said it earlier. Like, I don't have the time because I feel constrained, and I think, you know, even Camarilla mentioned it of, like, you know, just there's a lot going on, and I have four jobs. Which one am I focusing on right now? Or I have too many. My span of control is too large. So, of course, that's gonna come into the time factor. And, yeah, even the lack of confidence and capability. It's like, oh, you do know what you're doing, but maybe you don't think you you do. And so, again, that's where I was talking about the AI can help, like, be a partner, a thought partner on how to have those conversations, but so is your HR team to be able to you know, it's what I like to do and and be able to help you know, we do that in our training programs as well, like, help leaders figure out how to have those conversations and have them in real time and, you know, not waiting too long, to make sure that the that feedback is being given, but also, like, that their confidence is is being boosted up as well. Because. I think that's what happens. People don't give the feedback because they did it once, they did it bad, it didn't go well. Now I don't wanna feel uncomfortable anymore, so I'm just not gonna do it because I don't wanna put myself in that uncomfortable position. Yeah. It's a very vulnerable. exercise a lot of the time, isn't it? Yeah. I think, I think what I see here in these top answers, which doesn't surprise me either, it seems pretty from what I see across other businesses, but is this is the area where people start to fill in their own gaps and tell their own story, much like you had said earlier on. And I think that while training is really important, and I'm very excited about yours, Erin, but it doesn't always solve the problem holistically. So, let's kinda pull on I wanna pull on this thread about what is it the managers need to know and what organizations need to capture to be able to support better feedback and better conversations. So, Kamaria, what do you see that managers actually need to have in order to have really great performance conversations? Like, what are those signals, those performance signals, that data that they need to be able to capture? So I think they need to first start off with what what is the goal? Where are we going? What does code look like, and what are we trying to achieve? And I think that one of the things that we'd want to be able to capture is what is the expectation? This is a place where I see managers fall down a lot. And so when I'm developing them and and we're even doing goal setting, I specifically say, you please be as specific as you can. I love the Waffle House example about what good looks like for what you're asking of your team member. So I like, for example, if we're giving out, you know, a project, I'm gonna say, let me be clear. If you give me more than I expected, like, I'm giving you this task and you blow it out of the water, that's exceeding my expectation. If you give me exactly what I asked for, which I love and there's nothing wrong with it, that is meeting my expectations. If I have to chase you for updates, if I have to wonder where things are, if our stakeholders are unhappy and it's not timely, that is not meeting my expectations. So I like to be clear at the front to to start that conversation because then you're creating a standard. And so then as you are going along and you're evaluating the year, then you need ways to collect that data. Right? So the data's gonna say, like, the and and through your one to ones, and it's being captured. How how how how's this going? Is this on time? Is this on track? Have you checked in? So I think with the information they really need is whatever is going to help them align back to the standards that were set in the beginning of the conversation so that they can track it and have it as a part of their conversation. If if they know that's gonna be available to them, it's gonna be tremendously helpful. So they need realistic goals. They need to know what clarity looks like, and then they also need to be able to have a really good look at what's happening with their employees. I always use it as a saying. I go, is it a fish climbing the tree or my son getting his first job? And what that basically means is, am I do I understand the capacity of this particular employee? So am I asking them to do something that they don't know how to do and that they need development? Or am I asking them to do something that's really not even in their skill set? So they need. a real good understanding of their own employees to have an effective performance conversation as well. So those are the things that I think that need to be sort of collected and gathered so that people can have really productive conversations. Yeah. That's like, just that that self evaluation on your team, I think, what a smart what a smart thing to add in there. Aaron, is there anything that you see from performance signals or anything. different? I mean, I think, you know, Camaria mentioned around, like, I want you know, you're having one on ones. So I love, like, if you have a shared one on one document, great. We're both on the same page, literally, like, on the same page in the same document so we can see, you know, where we are. I love, like, you know, if you get kudos during the year or something, like, put those in a folder so you don't like, I like to just sort of keep track for myself, both for my own, like, self reviews, but also, you know, if I'm if I'm managing people, also making sure, like, I'm not losing track of things that they did well or feedback that I gave them. Because I will tell you, I'm in a certain stage of my life, and I don't remember things. And so I need to write stuff down. I had to do it when I was younger as well. But still, I just having that place where I can keep you know, and I'm doing this like I'm writing, but it's really typing. You know, putting something in a folder so I can look at it later and not have to rely on my memory twelve months later. Yeah. Oh my gosh. I don't know who can do that anymore. I can't do it either any longer. So good. Okay. We've got our third poll coming up. So we have talked about the context and signals that managers need, but let's get a little bit specific about the managers from the companies in our audience are getting that information today. So which best describes how most managers currently get the context they need for coaching and performance conversations within your organization? So they have one connected view of goals, feedback, check ins, and performance history. They piece information together from multiple systems and reports. They rely primarily on information gathered during formal review cycles. They rely heavily on personal notes and memory. That's a tough one for me. Or the approach varies wildly across managers and teams, and there's not a lot of consistency. We have one oh, look at our rising star here on the most popular one. Looks like it is. They have one connected view of goals, feedback, check ins, and performance history, and. that is really what we want. That's so good. That's so good. I think, but what a useful picture of really everyone here, what you're working with. I think that's wonderful and why still manager effectiveness is so important, making sure signals and all that data in one place. So we've got one last question I'm gonna fit in, for both of you. really quickly before we pivot. Let's end on a recommendation. So if you were talking to an HR leader and they had ninety days to improve their manager effectiveness, where would you recommend that they start? Erin, I'll I'll start with you. That's a great question. I would if it were me, like, I would wanna know how employees are feeling about the processes in the company. Like, are they a hindrance, or are they, you know, helping, or are they not helping? Making sure that one on ones are actually happening because oftentimes it's like, yeah. We want you to have one on ones and then they don't happen. And that there's. maybe some some sort of structure to them. And just re really make sure there is a mechanism for growth conversations whether that's like I'm checking in with managers to be like, hey. Tell me about how your employees are doing. Where do they wanna grow? How can we support them? To something even more formal than that if the organization has, you know, a a means to do so. Yep. Starting with sentiment, I love it. Erin or gosh. I've done this twice now, everybody. I'm so sorry. I love it both of you. I just love your names too much. I'm I think you're one beautiful person. Kamaria, what do you think? If you had ninety days, where would you recommend somebody start? Go see the work. I always I you know, when I work with organizations, I always say go see the work. And by that, I mean, like, talk to your managers. You know, I I go back to the the organization where I was supporting them in rolling out their listening tool and why their manager usage was at 12%. And we assume it's because, well, I didn't want to. But what happened was when I went to go see the work, I found that the emails weren't going to the right place. I found that they had no time in their schedules. I found that we had not properly trained them. There was a plethora of whys that once we removed the friction and solve for, they actually got so much better. And so I would say to anyone, talk to your managers. Ask them what's going on. Ask them about the things. Ask them why they're not do you be surprised at why they're not doing the things that you ask of them? So I always say when they won't do the thing, like, that's when you go have a conversation with them, and. you might find that there's lots of things that you can improve that will improve their effectiveness. Yeah. Oh, I love that. Going out in the field. Sometimes surveys don't always capture it. Such good advice. Alright. Well, Erin and Kamaria, thank you so so very much. I think you have shared such wonderful, like, parts of your expertise and given everyone such great and practical things to think about as far as manager effectiveness goes, and making sure that we're balancing all of this fast pace and change that we are in the middle of and is just gonna keep getting faster. So, thank you so very much to both of our speakers. For everyone here, if you'd like to continue the conversation, you can connect with Erin, Kamaria, or myself using the QR codes that you see on the screen. If you are able to add a note, I recommend just popping in, a comment that you join us through the webinar so that we know where we met you and can follow-up. Please keep adding any questions to the q and a, panel. If we'll still if we still got time so I'm trying to keep us on track. If we still got time to answer a few questions, we will do that. If not, for sure, we will follow-up in other avenues to make sure that we get what matters to you most addressed. So thank you both very much. I think we have painted a really great picture today that managers need goals, continuous feedback, better visibility into what's happening across their teams, and they need less administrative burden, and less work to be able to be more supportive in having those meaningful performance discussions and coaching conversations. So as AI becomes a part of management, it should provide context to reduce that cognitive load, not replace human judgment. I think we're all on the same page about what that looks like. So that is the challenge that Betterworks is designed to address. Betterworks connects goals, feedback, conversations, and AI supported insights so that managers can lead with greater clarity, consistency, and impact. And to show you what that looks like in practice, I want to invite our Better Works Solutions engineer, Dori, to the stage, and we're gonna do a brief demonstration to highlight all of the wonderful things that Kamaria and Erin have talked about. Hi, Dori. Welcome to our stage. Thank you for joining us. I think Kamaria and Erin closed on something really important that I thought would be good place to start if that's okay with you, and that is performance signals. So when we think about what managers need to be able to track and how they're doing that, especially based on the poll results and how people are capturing different information, would you mind being able to show us how organizations are using Betterworks to be able to address information gathering and AI insights to be able to to field all of these signals. Absolutely. Let me share my screen, and we can jump right in. Okay. Hopefully, you can see that. It should be coming up there. Amazing. Perfect. Yeah. Absolutely. So great stuff today. And I was thinking the same thing. Right? The technology with with Betterworks is bringing together all of those interactions that are happening between employees and their managers. And when we think about managers, right, they're so busy, and we're we're expecting them to remember all these things. So this is where Betterworks can really help, and we'll collect all of those signals and we'll surface that leveraging AI and summarize it for leaders. Right? What we're looking at right now is an employee profile in Betterworks, and this is where we've been having conversations regularly. We're capturing feedback. We're setting goals and working towards those goals. Maybe we're aligning it to strategic initiatives. And the system is tracking all of those interactions, and then it's starting to surface for the employee and the leader. Here are your key achievements. Here are your strengths. Here are some areas to develop so they have a head start going into the next conversation, into setting development plans, and the the growth and development for Daemon specifically. What AI can also do is start to capture those skills. So this is taking a skills taxonomy, leveraging that in the platform and all of those different signals, and it's starting to identify the different sources, where these things are coming from, and starting to infer those skills so that an employee can have an updated profile with the skills that they they have, but also the skills that they wanna develop. So let me just pause there. Caitlin, anything that you you wanted to add there? No. I think it's so great, but it just, I think, reinforces the points and the themes that Kumar and Erin said. And and I just love the point about making sure it's connecting to a broader purpose when you're having these conversations and what they're working on as far as the development focus goes. Absolutely. I think that's so good. Was there any part of the platform maybe around one on ones? Like, if we think about notes capturing or summaries, is there other ways that we can leverage AI to help reduce administrative burden while we're going into some of these harder sometimes harder discussion? Or if I have 50 direct reports, what would enable me to help me be more human and present and build those relationships? Yeah. Absolutely. So a couple things come to mind. One is just how we are greeting managers as soon as they come in. Right? If they do have this, a large group that they're supporting, how do we help them focus on the right things? How do we call to their attention their direct reports that need their attention? Are there employees that haven't set goals or that aren't having conversations or receiving feedback? The platform starts to surface those things for the leaders so that they can quickly engage and start to drive the behaviors that they wanna see within their own team in addition to the application notifications and and automation that's already happening behind the scenes. But you you call that a good point too. Right? If we're going into a conversation, we have one on ones with our direct reports. What are some of those tools leveraging AI to prepare us for the conversation? So what we're looking at right now is a leader going into a one on one with one of their direct reports who's a new hire. And, right, Michelle might be even a a new leader herself, so she's now given some some topics, some things to think about. These topics could be driven by an admin, or she can add them, or her direct report can add them. So we have a collective group that's setting an agenda. We're tracking action items. And along the way, we're be we're pulling in those other, those other areas. We're pulling in those goals. What is it that Damon's actually working on? Have we had previous one on ones? The AI will start to summarize that for us so that we don't have to remember. Right? We can just leverage AI to call out previous action items or agenda topics notes, and that'll surface that for the leader going into this next one on one. I love it. You know, my personally, my favorite part is the amalgamation of the data because then you don't have to go back and try and piece all those different notes together to try and keep track of it. So I find it saves me so much time in even using this myself. This is great. Was there any other areas you wanted to highlight, Doreen? I just wanted to highlight one other area, which was, you know, bringing this into where managers actually work. So we went right into Better Works, but we realized that managers aren't starting their day there. Right? They're they're starting it in their everyday tools like Outlook, Gmail, Teams, Slack. So we have plugins there where we can meet employ meet employees and managers in the flow of work, not only to, you know, start to remind them, keep those things top of mind, but also to quickly take action. So as a leader, I'm gonna receive notifications. I'm gonna get weekly digest on my direct reports. But I also can leverage the panel on the right side that just calls out, here are the things, again, that maybe need your attention, or do we wanna check-in with our our direct reports? Are their goals on track? Do they have feedback that they've received? Maybe we we just thought of a one on one topic. We wanna add it right here. Just reduces that friction for when we actually go into that next conversation or or we wanna actually give feedback. We can do that right from, flow of work. Right? I don't need to log in to the platform to give feedback. I can actually do it right from here. Yeah. You call it less friction. I call it less clicks, and that is my favorite takeaway. If I can do everything in a one stop shop, it makes my life so much easier. Dori, thank you so very much for this super quick run through, and reinforcing the points that, Kamara Kamaria and Aaron have shared with us. Kamaria and Aaron, I'm so sorry for sometimes mixing up your names. But thank you again for sharing your experience, and thank you to everybody who has joined us and participated in the polls and the chat and the questions. We did run out of time, and I don't wanna keep you over, but we will get your questions answered. So I really appreciate you participating in a belief that it is possible to address all of your questions. This is the second conversation in our webinar series. It called the new rules for performance. On September 15, we are going to focus on coaching behaviors that make strong management sustainable. I'm really excited for that one. And on September 29, I'm super excited about this one, we are going to connect real time performance to the talent intelligence that organizations need in order to execute their strategy. Drawing a line in the sand from what the end user experience is and making sure that's really good for our managers and employees, but making sure it's driving value for our businesses just really gets me so excited about making how that's designed and how strategy is executed. So you all will be receiving a recording for or links for the recording for this session, in a follow-up email. You'll also be provided four links to register for our next upcoming sessions in September. So we hope that you enjoyed it today and found value in it, and we hope to see you on the next one. Thank you all, everyone, so very much, and have a really great rest of your day.