Great Managers

Gallup Consulting supports leaders and managers in their efforts to engage workers and customers with proven measurement tools and training courses. Discoveries from on eof the largest management studies in the world - 80,000 managers in 400 companies - provide the foundation for many of our leaders development and manager education programmes. All Gallup Consulting programmes include education and training components geared toward teaching practical skills in using our assessment tools and applications to successfully lead teams and build employee engagement.

Great Managers

At the entry point of The Path, the first steps must be performed almost perfectly or the remaining linkages to customer engagement, revenue growth, and profit will not occur. First, you must identify the employee's individual strengths. You must position that individual to perform a role that capitalises on these strengths. Failure to meet these two requirements cannot be corrected by either the employee's motivation or expert coaching. When we refer to "strengths" we are referring to a person's ability to provide consistent, near-perfect performance in a given activity. And the key to building a strength is to identify a person's dominant themes of talent, then refine them with knowledge and skills. We believe that, when selecting employees, companies have spent far too much time and money focusing on the skills and knowledge of employees and not nearly enough on their talents, which are the basis of strength and success. Truth be told, most companies trip themselves up right at the start of this path because they have no accurate way of knowing how much talent they are bringing in, nor how well that talent is positioned.

Learn more about Gallup's solutions that help organisations address challenges through talent-based hiring and strengths-based development.

Having successfully taken these first two steps, you arrive at The Path's most critical juncture. You must find a way to engage these talented employees. Again, there are many ways to do this -- pay them more, provide more generous benefits -- but these are low-character solutions. The only way to engage talented employees successfully is to select and develop great managers. Great managers can select the best people, set accurate expectations for them, motivate them, and develop them. Companies that are unable to create this kind of environment will be forced off The Path. They will lose more talented people than they keep. They will miscast, overpromote, undervalue, and otherwise misuse those talented employees who do stay. Lacking talented people in the right roles, this company will have to revert to less robust routes to performance -- an overreliance on marketing, an unquestioned fondness for acquisition, a frantic push for "bought" growth. Pressed by high character competition, these routes will serve this company poorly. And, in the end, lacking great managers to keep it on the right path, this company will lose.

Gallup University's Great Manager Programme incorporates the findings of Gallup's extensive and ongoing research. In this cutting-edge developmental programme that is highlighted by a 2½-day classroom component, managers will gain a greater understanding of themselves, their talents, and their management style. Participants will discover engaging concepts, strategies, and tools that will help them apply the Four Keys to Great Management. Learn more about Gallup's Great Manager Programme and read about The heart of Great Managing from the Gallup Management Journal.

Learn more about Gallup's solutions for selecting and developing great managers by reading: First, Break All the Rules by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman.