It is quite common to find young stars promoted to the position of frontline leaders through their technical excellence and great attitude.
One of the difficulties with promoting younger people to management roles is their ability to have the maturity to manage employees who could be old enough to be their parents.
As a senior manager, what can we do to help this transition? We need to enable our frontline leaders to be genuine leaders.
Providing them with the tools to be leaders and the support of the organisation enables a young leader to manage all their employees with empathy and consideration.
No matter what their age.
There are several essential skills your leaders need to have to be successful in their role.
And, the organisation can support your leaders by enabling them to have the room in their role to actually lead.
Not to just manage.
What does this mean? Organisations will often need a change of mindset.
A frontline leader makes decisions, develops policies, uses their judgement and discretion and oversees implementation of improvements.
By creating this environment your organisation is more flexible to change and increases its productivity.
Within this outer framework the frontline leaders need to develop specific skills to increase employee engagement and motivation.
Firstly enable your frontline leaders to give balanced feedback.
Spend a significant amount of time on this aspect.
Most managers have a strong tendency to give mostly corrective feedback, look at ways to balance this out.
Spending time on the floor for instance will provide opportunities for frontline leaders to see what their employees are doing right.
The right behaviours can be reinforced by simply commenting why what they're doing is effective.
Detailed, immediate and accurate feedback is very powerful.
Develop your frontline leader's informal coaching style.
Look at how coaching works, look at finding the opportunities.
Look at managing time and how significant the impact effective coaching has one employees compared to spending time on administrative/managerial tasks.
If frontline leaders are given the knowledge on where to put their energies because of the link to employee engagement and financial returns they will maximise their 'face time' with their employees.
If they think the most important thing is getting that report to their manager then that will be given priority.
These techniques will assist in increasing employee engagement and employee motivation.