The role of the manager has dramatically changed, with many leaders feeling overwhelmed and exhausted. A survey by Gartner revealed that 68% of leaders are overwhelmed, but only 14% of companies have actually taken steps to alleviate their burden. Additionally, numerous surveys show that 75% of employees in any given company say that the worst aspect of their job is their immediate boss.

What’s causing the hybrid manager stress crisis?

But what is causing this stress crisis? Well, we’ve already seen that retention risk issues and loss of talent have increased dramatically. This places a high expectation on leaders to find solutions, and if we don’t have a clear strategy to combat this, the trend will only get worse.

So what does it all mean? Firstly, this certainly won’t just fix itself and go away. So we need to acknowledge that the issue is real. Secondly, it’s going to require a partnership between organisational support and intentional leadership strategy so that we can stay at the razor’s edge of relevancy to our team’s motivational and skill needs.

Effective hybrid manager-employee connection

As an example of how this works, Microsoft found that when they supported their leaders to help teams do things like prioritise or nurture the culture and support work-life balance, employees felt more connected. Doing things like weekly one-on-ones led to a 54% increase in engagement, a 35% increase in productivity, with a 15% decrease in burnout. This is an example of organisational and leadership support partnership.

Another organisational trend is the increase of flattening hierarchies, putting managers in the role of player coach. This demands that today’s managers, particularly those in flexible work models, be strong people leaders. Acknowledging the greater demand for human connection, things like building trust, aligning teams, and embracing feedback have all become high value traits leaders need.

There’s also been a major shift from performance management to performance development, where creating these mindsets and skills training have become vitally important for sustainable performance.

Critical skills for hybrid leaders

Given these changes, which critical skills do leaders working within the hybrid model need to develop?

• Building trust and developing inclusion, strategically.
• Communicating well and often.
• The ability to drive focus with accountability.
• Creating a strong team culture within fragmented work schedules.
• Displaying empathy to avoid team burnout and having strong emotional intelligence skills.
• Driving passion and purpose. In other words, using a high degree of spiritual intelligence and more value driven skills.

Ultimately, people skills have now taken prominence over hard skills. As a result, leaders will need a high level of these skills to lead a hybrid workplace model. It requires drive, collaboration, empathy, and compassion, resilience, as well as dealing with all the ambiguity that comes with it.

Some organisations have taken deliberate steps to create a partnership model and actually reimagine what a leader looks like as we move into this permanent hybrid work future. This is a great approach as it marries organisational support and strategy, reflecting that managers can’t do it all (and we shouldn’t expect them to).