With happiness at work falling and employee burnout rising, something needs to change urgently. Managers hold the power to create a more enjoyable, happier and healthier workplace for their staff, which will in turn increase engagement and productivity levels. The key to achieving this is to inject more love and enablement into the practice of management itself.

‘Command-and-Control’ is no longer cutting it
The enduring style of management in most organisations today is still best described as ‘command-and-control’ – providing detailed direction based on the manager’s own experience and jumping in to solve and firefight staff problems for them. In reality, this mental model of managing people all too easily leads to micromanagement. Constantly looking over your staff’s shoulders to ensure work gets done in the way you think is best, only inhibits employees from developing their own problem-solving skills. This robs them of the opportunity to build their confidence and become more independent in their roles and responsibilities.

True people management is less about directing and more about enabling others, helping them to flourish, and bringing out the best in teams. If managers are to encourage the highest level of employee contribution, a new style of management is needed, one which revolves around the “how” of learning to engage the talents of others in a respectful and inclusive way, rather than merely the “what” of management that transactional and episodic training methods continue to teach.

For many organisations, investing in coaching skills training has been a popular response to this issue. However, the primary intention has always been to teach managers how to be a coach—they’re taught to hold (transactional) coaching sessions. Yet this approach holds an inherent conflict in that the person you’re expected to offer yourself to as their honest coach is also your direct report for whom you hold the agenda. As a result, what’s being taught doesn’t easily align with the cut and thrust of a busy workplace and rarely yields measurable outcomes.

Rather than learning to perform coaching sessions, managers must learn to adopt coaching-related behaviours into their everyday management style that underpins a coaching mindset. By becoming alert to coachable moments and developing the technique for asking insightful questions, team members are afforded the opportunity to think for themselves and contribute their best work. Learning to use an enquiry-led approach to management is a surefire way of cultivating more authentic relationships with staff—it demonstrates a genuine desire to see others develop, naturally pulling people towards you.

Operational Coaching® as the new way forward
Bringing coaching into the flow of work in this way can quickly enhance a team’s cognitive decision-making skills so that they develop the level of confidence to make decisions before a manager needs to get involved – a much more efficient and long-lasting way of managing people. This new style of management called Operational Coaching® was the subject of a recent and extensive, government-sponsored, randomised-control trial conducted by the London School of Economics (LSE), which proved that managers changed all nine behaviours measured, spent less time doing and 70% more time coaching their team members. It’s a style of management that can also benefit the wider workplace culture by creating an environment that’s more engaging, productive, inclusive and collaborative.

This approach redirects managers’ time and capacity away from busy managing and doing work towards, instead, the essentials of developing modern people engagement skills—leading and coaching. This way, when coachable moments arise at work, managers can challenge, support and grow the capabilities of their team members by stimulating their own thinking. Colleagues become more engaged, recognised and rewarded. As their competency and confidence grow, managers are released from aspects of their to-do lists and can direct even more attention towards coaching their team members.

Managers who are provided with the skills to extract the best from their people will enhance engagement and productivity on an individual level. The fiscal value of effective management, though, goes far beyond this. The Confederation of British Industry (CBI) calculated that just a 7% increase in the quality of management could unlock an extra £110bn for the UK economy, not to mention halt the mass exodus of both managers and employees.

So, it’s time to start remodelling your approach to management, adapting your own behaviour to be able to engage with others more openly and finding opportunities to intentionally enable their professional development. A sustained effort to embrace this Operational Coaching® approach will spread the love in your organisation and help develop an enthusiastic and self-learning team.

And who wouldn’t want to work in an environment like that?

Dominic Ashley-Timms and Laura Ashley-Timms are co-authors of new management bestseller The Answer is a Question.