Cary L. Cooper is the 50th Anniversary Professor of Organizational Psychology and Health at the Alliance Manchester Business School, University of Manchester, and co-author of the recent book Wellbeing at Work, 2024 (Kogan Page, London). Here he explores the role of the line manager in a business’ wellbeing strategy.
Lao Tzu, the spiritual leader of Taoism, once wrote: “A leader is best when you barely know he exists. When the work is done, his aim fulfilled, the people will say ‘we did it ourselves’.”
Managers, from shop-floor to top floor, have a significant role to play in managing their team’s health, wellbeing and productivity at work. Yet, as the Chartered Institute of Management recent report found, 80% of managers are ‘accidental managers’, that is, that they get their role with little or no training – or are promoted/recruited based almost entirely on their technical skills in their previous job. Yet, the performance and productivity of people is strongly related to ‘how they are managed’. A great deal of academic research has found that ‘command and control’ management styles not only stress workers but also inhibit their performance, ultimately leading to employee ill health and/or high labour turnover. So, the ‘role of the line’ should be a high priority for HR in their quest to minimise workplace stress and in their search for the holy grail of enhance productivity.
Find the ‘people skills’
So, what does HR have to do to deal with this difficult issue? First, in promoting or recruiting people to line management roles, HR needs to ensure that there is parity between their candidate’s technical skills and their ‘people skills’ in the assessment process. By ‘people skills’, I am talking about their emotional intelligence, and as well as their social and interpersonal skills. Far too often HR concentrates on the technical skills of prospective managers, and not on their personal attributes, their ability to listen to others, their social skills and the like. These latter skills have become even more important in a hybrid world of work, where some employees are working substantially from home, are less visible, have less time with the team or their own boss.
Second, HR needs to do something about the existing managerial pool in their organisation, in terms of enhancing their emotional intelligence and people skills. This means doing an audit of all their managers, from the shop-floor to top floor, in terms of identifying those who might need some form of social skill development (ie EQ training, resilience training, etc.). I have a rule of thumb theory that about 40% of managers in an organisation may have these skills naturally, 40% have reasonable levels of EQ, and 20% may be less amenable to social skill training and should be encouraged to take on more technical roles and away from management! HR should know which managers could benefit from this sort of training, and encourage them, in terms of their development needs, to take on this training opportunity.
The building block for wellbeing
The line manager is the fundamental ‘building block’ for workplace wellbeing. As Chair of the National Forum for Health & Wellbeing at Work (an employer’s organisation representing over 50 global/national employers, and comprised of Directors of Health & Wellbeing, HRDs and Chief Medical Officers), we identified the role of the line manager as an important part of strategic organisational wellbeing. If organisations and countries are to deal with the high costs of employee stress, high labour turnover and low levels of productivity, it is essential that the issue of wellbeing is taken seriously by senior leadership teams and Boards of both private and public sector bodies. It is no longer acceptable for HR to mouth the words “the most valuable resource we have is our people”. We need senior HR leaders to treat the issue of employee health and wellbeing much more strategically than ‘the wellbeing day’, mindfulness at lunchtime, mental health first aid and other low hanging fruit initiatives. HR needs to look at the role of the line manager, needs to identify the metrics to measure what ‘wellbeing success’ looks like, needs Board buy in and accountability, etc. It needs employee health and wellbeing to be a strategic imperative for the organisation. Even at the start of the Industrial Revolution, John Ruskin, the great British social reformer, in 1851, highlighted the need to look after workers: “In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: they must be fit for it, they must not do too much of it, and they must have a sense of success in it.” That is HR’s challenge today.
