Why “Team Leaders” Matter

Jim Clifton might be the smartest person on earth. Who is Jim? Jim is CEO of Gallup®, and since Gallup® seems to know everything, Jim has to be a very smart guy.

I read everything Jim writes, and his newest book contains a most interesting subtitle. The book’s title is It’s The Manager, and here are those words below the title:

Gallup® Finds That The Quality of Managers and Team Leaders Is The Single Biggest Factor In Your Organization’s Long-Term Success

Jim’s including “team leaders” here is very purposeful, as he makes clear in the book. But candidly, that isn’t news to us. Two recent clients come to mind, both in manufacturing, where in one case the top manufacturing executive over nine plants made the unilateral decision that team leaders would own retention goals and conduct Stay Interviews with their teams. The opposite decision was made in the other company, that those supervisors who manage the team leaders would take on those responsibilities.

Which decision was better? And did that decision matter a little or a lot? The organization that leveraged team leaders cut turnover by greater than 30%, while the other company saw much smaller reductions. Having managed both engagements myself, I can tell you that decision regarding whether to anoint team leaders with all of the leadership responsibilities for our project was the major difference-maker.

The argument for is simple: team leaders are in their employees’ faces every day, providing instruction, feedback, and building relationships. The argument against goes like this:

• Team leaders are on the clock, so they really aren’t supervisors
• Team leaders haven’t been trained to manage people
• Team leaders are only there because our real supervisors are spread too thin

Or this one: team leaders were chosen because they were the best workers but that doesn’t make them legitimate supervisors.

But now switch your viewpoint angle to that of your teams. They know none of the usual objections, but just that this person is my boss. This is the person I discuss over dinner each night, good or bad, and this is the person I must please each day. Employees don’t care about titles, on-or-off the clock, or how much training their boss has. The boss is the boss.

This goes far deeper than manufacturing, too, and hospitals come to mind. Nurse managers on average supervise 69 nurses, spread across multiple shifts. So, charge nurses were created to bridge the gap, to be available to answer questions and maybe do scheduling. When I visit a friend in a hospital, I always ask their nurse when they last had an individual meeting with their manager and the consistent answer is, “The last time I screwed up.”

Our hospital clients say nurse managers should be accountable for turnover and conduct Stay Interviews, despite their impossible spans of control. Yet those very nurses they are trying to retain are talking with and getting feedback from their charge nurses every day…so these charge nurses are playing the “team lead” role and likely have the greatest impact on each nurse’s retention and degree of engagement.

To cut turnover and improve engagement with the majority of workers in your company, first-line leaders matter most…regardless of what you call them.

Schedule a free one-on-one strategy session with our team and we will listen to your concerns, probe deeply to learn more about your workplace needs and work together to find solutions to cut turnover and improve employee engagement. https://go.oncehub.com/TeamFinnegan