Line Managers have the toughest job in most large corporates today. They need to lead, inspire, coach and support their teams. Often whilst managing their own deliverables and responsibilities. The complexity of the environment they are navigating in is immense, from supporting the wellbeing of their teams, to guiding them through the toughest cost of living crisis many have ever experienced.  

To help them understand their role and ensure your Learning and Development teams are creating the right support to enable them to succeed, companies need to take a step back and RE:DEFINE the role of a Line Manager.

But where do you start?

The obvious starting point is articulating what it means to be a Line Manager in your organisation today - their role, responsibilities and the expectation you have of them. This should also clearly define team sizes, decision-making authorities and learning and development programmes in place to support them. But in truth, this is the basics and doesn't go far enough.

To truly unleash their potential, you need to articulate the behaviours Line Managers need to display every day. This will underpin the experience you then build to support them.

Defining the behaviours successfully takes five key things:

1. A clear understanding of the strategy and purpose. The behaviours you ask your Line Managers to display and encourage need to be in pursuit of your company goals.

2. Involvement of Line Managers, team members and leaders in defining the behaviours that the business needs to see more and less of. This’ll help to identify gaps and opportunities, as well as engage your people from the get-go.

3. When you are ready to share the expectation you have of Line Managers, be clear and provide specific examples of what the behaviours look like in action.

4. Review the employee journey for Line Managers to ensure it is built to enable the behaviours you want to see. Look at everything from recruitment and promotion through to recognition and development. Also take time to identify the opportunities they have to reinforce the behaviours to inspire their teams.

5. Hold your Line Managers accountable by measuring their performance against the behaviours. Change will only happen if people see the business is committed to it. Help Line Managers understand this is a supportive move to ensure they’re set up for success, and not a punitive thing.

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RE:DEFINING the role of Line Managers will help set them up for success, but that’s just the start. If you need to change how you fire up your Line Managers, contact us at hello@unitedcultureco.com.

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