Upskilling managers to boost team performance

Across many different contexts, managers play a pivotal role in shaping the success of their teams and the business outcomes that flow from team performance. The best managers shape their team cultures positively and with empathy, enabling team members to perform at their best, which in turn delivers better results. So how can employers develop managers’ soft skills and people-centric capabilities to elevate team performance?

This example is from a healthcare client, but the insights it reveals are relevant for managers in many other contexts too…

The need: The crucial role of manager soft skills

Why do ‘soft skills’ matter in scientific communication? And how do you engage a group of extremely busy, globally dispersed managers to focus on developing these skills with their team members?

Our client, a global pharmaceutical company, has teams of field-based medical specialists, who play a vital role in engaging with external healthcare professionals and decision makers.

Our client knows that soft skills are key to helping medical managers do their jobs more efficiently and effectively.  They know that if their managers could enhance their skills to support and coach their team members more impactfully, they could achieve better external engagement and gain critical market insights.

Acteon came onboard to design and deliver a program to equip our clients’ medical managers with the tools they needed to build confidence and improved communication with their teams.

The result? A Gold Award-winning program that has seen a huge increase in engagement, participation, attendance and confidence in using these soft skills for positive impact.

The challenge: Overcoming barriers and creating a learning community

Managers of these field medical teams typically face a number of challenges:

• Time pressure, large workloads and competing priorities.
• Being geographically dispersed, usually quite isolated from other managers, and therefore not seeing examples of good practice.
• Often being reasonably new to the managerial role, typically having been promoted due to scientific excellence more than managerial skills.

Previous engagement in optional soft skills training had been low. It seemed like an additional task on an already full plate. In the rare instances when managers had any spare time, scientific learning would usually win out.

This presented a missed opportunity: making time would help unlock better ways of working. By prioritizing better, improving leadership and communication skills, and connecting with peers, managers would be able to work more effectively and get better results.

Our client wanted to create a platform for these managers to share ideas and find commonalities, to help them improve their soft skills and develop more effective ways to empower their teams.

The approach: Practical and actionable

We worked with our client to define core principles for a training program, with a focus on achieving business goals and addressing the challenges to learning.

These principles included:

1. Clearly linking the program to organizational strategy

To help managers see why the program mattered, a clear connection was made with strategic priorities and role objectives. The program was also aligned with global HR initiatives, to build credibility with senior stakeholders.

2. Listening and responding to the managers’ needs directly

Starting by listening to how learners talk about their challenges, and the types of resources and support they would find most helpful, helped us to design resources to meet their needs.

3. Making the program manageable and actionable

Resources needed to be engaging, easy to access and user-friendly. They would help managers identify specific actions to help them work more effectively, and start using those actions habitually.

4. Using colleague voices

We wanted to make the learning content feel real by hearing directly from colleagues, sharing their experiences and perspectives.

5. Building a learning community

Building a community of practice for ongoing support was critical, enabling the sharing of ideas and good practice going forwards.

The change: Results-focused and engaging

To meet the needs we’d identified, we designed short, easy-to-follow, and accessible learning in blocks of content that were easy to consume within managers’ busy schedules.

These would support the development of soft skills, particularly around prioritization, time management, communication, and coaching team members.

We created a blend of colleague videos, live virtual workshops, and toolkits that managers could immediately start using with their teams, including:

• Colleague voice videos: Introduced by the program lead, with interviews with managers to share their experiences and perspectives.
• Activity packs: ‘Workshop-in-a-box’ resources for managers to use in their regular team meetings or run as one-off sessions, aligned to the videos and tools. These include questions, discussion points, key learning summaries, practical tips for applying concepts, and evaluation questions.
• Tools: A set of practical supporting materials such as visual summaries and decision trees, that can be shared with team members.
• Community of practice: A learning community on Teams, where managers can share insights, join discussions and post questions. To increase engagement, this is also used as the main broadcast channel for promoting the workshops and other initiatives.

The results: Meaningful engagement and improvement

The program has had fantastic results, with increased engagement, participation and positive feedback. It went on to win Gold at the Brandon Hall Award.

Managers and team members who once felt disconnected from soft skills training are now equipped with practical tools and a clear understanding of how these skills drive success.

The feedback from participants was hugely positive:

“All the sessions added value to my current role.”

“These tools and templates are very important to help us change our mindset and behaviors. With time, it will become natural.”

“I love these short, focused training sessions as I can attend easily and apply learning immediately.”

“I will prioritize these as they are so useful.”

The stats backed this up too:

• 67% increase in engagement on the informal learning community on Teams.
• 97% of participants said they were ‘likely’ or ‘extremely likely’ to adopt, adapt, and apply the concepts covered in the program’s training.
• Attendance at in-person training increased by 86%.

By creating a space for team members to learn from each other, we found a way to empower and unite managers despite the variations in their roles in different locations, languages and time zones.

The work continues, as we keep building focus on engagement online and encouraging individual peer-to-peer networks to thrive.