Top employers have effective middle managers, who most influence worker happiness

Jim Henson was a collector of people.

I had heard of his generous heart, but this particular phrasing came from Kermit the Frog during his commencement speech at the University of Maryland, Henson’s alma mater.

“He loved collecting actors and artists and musicians — anyone with talent," Kermit said. “He could always see the spark in someone. He saw the potential and he saw what was unique in each person.”

Henson’s success, Kermit said, was in leveraging people’s strengths to create a franchise. As cheesy as it was to have a Muppet give a graduation speech — and the speech was full of really bad jokes — it started me thinking.

Of U.S. survey respondents in the new Gallup global leadership report, 30% said their managers had the greatest daily influence on their daily lives. That’s close to the 34% that ranked family members as most influential.

A LinkedIn workforce confidence survey found 69% of U.S. workers would rather quit than have a bad boss. The rate is higher for Gen Z and millennials.

I believe both reports. I’m a middle manager, and I’ve been told that when I have a bad day — in editing or people interactions — others do, too.

Some days that’s a lot to handle. An Inc. article pointed out the ironies of the Gallup report. Workers wanted managers to exhibit hope, trust, compassion and stability. The report also said managers were more likely to be stressed, angry, sad and lonely than their non-manager peers.

It’s clear many workplaces need to change their expectations of managers so workers can get the support they need.

I think it goes back to Kermit’s observation about Henson. The stressed and lonely parts of a supervisor’s job come in trying to figure out how to implement the changes upper management wants. But when you organize the work to workers’ strengths — their uniqueness — they’re happier, and you are, too.

A Harvard Business Review article from several years ago explained it as playing chess instead of checkers. Chess pieces have different roles, strengths and limitations, requiring a more complex and dynamic strategy. The same is required of managers if they want to be effective. You and your workers will be unhappy if you decide each of them will meet his or her goal in exactly the same way.

It certainly doesn’t give them any agency. Kevin Ward took over Interfaith Outreach & Community Partners in Plymouth in 2020 — a trying time for many organizations, including his.

He had worked in both entrepreneurial and corporate jobs, and at the employer before Interfaith, he felt he was filling a need and performing his duties. But he wanted more, both for himself and his organization.

Interfaith allowed him to include his employees in building a stronger nonprofit: It took listening, and still does. And when they felt they were being heard, he said, they became “engaged, healthy employees.”

Interfaith ranked sixth on this year’s Minnesota Top Workplaces list of small businesses and also won a special award for its organization’s values.

Brooke Vuckovic, a clinical professor of leadership at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, wrote in the Harvard Business Review that organizational values are often upheld because of middle managers.

She surveyed her MBA students on the best leaders. Some named famous CEOs. But most talked about how their supervisors “made a meaningful difference in the lives of their teams and upheld the moral compass of their organizations.”

That’s not magic. It’s work, Vuckovic said. Good middle managers constantly ask themselves if they are upholding the company’s mission and their own standards, and whether they are communicating effectively.

And no pressure, but us middle managers are the biggest single factor affecting employee engagement, according to a study by workplace technology vendor UKG. More than 77% of engaged employees said they worked for effective managers; 27% of the engaged employees said they had bad managers.

Employees were evaluating managers’ people skills. But the study made a point of saying that many times managers are judged instead on how they fulfill administrative skills.

The study concludes that managers need to be caring and empathetic to be effective. And bad management results in lower productivity and innovation.

Employee engagement, a huge factor in retention, is a big topic of discussion this year among companies of all sizes.

And it tends to be higher among those who make the Star Tribune’s Top Workplaces list each year.

This is the 16th year the Minnesota Star Tribune has partnered with Pennsylvania-based Energage to rank employers in the North Star State. Energage works with media companies across the country for Top Workplaces rankings in over 65 markets.

Employers in Minnesota with 50 or more workers are eligible for the program. They must agree to have their employees take a 25-question survey on topics including company values, communication, workplace dynamics, employee engagement, meaningfulness of work, leadership and pay and benefits.

This year, 137,573 workers at 389 companies participated in the surveys. The result: 200 made our rankings, listed by size. Another 109 met Energage’s national standards for the survey but weren’t rated high enough to crack the ranked lists.

It’s worth noting that four companies have made the ranked lists all 16 years of the program: Allianz Life, Mortenson, Right at Home and UCare.

We have written over the years about how these four companies continue to find ways to support employees through training programs and flexibility.

The studies find that this continual work in good times allows for company culture to remain employee-centered in times of financial uncertainty, like this year.