Empowering managers to be more human will impact corporate culture

Myriad influencers on TikTok, Instagram, and, of course, LinkedIn tout the bennies and Benjamins associated with ditching your nine-to-five for “being your own boss.” It’s no wonder your employees might be fantasizing about ditching corporate drudgery to be a freelance travel journalist galavanting the globe, collecting experiences and fat checks.

HR Brew reported last April that frustration with the nine-to-five, including a lack of desired wages and flexibility, has led to more employees leaving the corporate world to strike out on their own. But one HR and employment expert told HR Brew the thing often drawing employees away from the grind is a difficult manager.

“There are people that...leave corporate [for] entrepreneurship because they have this vision and they want to become entrepreneurs, but I think a lot of people are actually running away from corporate, and they want things to be better and they think that entrepreneurship will solve those things,” said Ashley Herd, founder of manager training company Manager Method.

After more than a decade in legal and HR departments at companies including McKinsey & Company, KFC, and Cumulus Media, Herd did strike out on her own and now runs a consultancy focused on helping companies level-up their managers. She also cohosts the HR Besties podcast.

She said her experience as in-house counsel on employment issues and experience in the HR field made her uniquely able to help managers have real and useful conversations with employees.

“I always thought...I wish there was a way to be more of a scalable [way to be a] playwright for managers,” Herd said of providing “scripts” for managers to successfully cover important topics. “The idea being to have these conversations so employees don’t walk away…feeling like they hid the ball.”

Herd suggested that many employees don’t actually want to start a whole new business, they just want their working life to be better. She said as much in a LinkedIn post last year.

Entrepreneurship—even in her own experience as a business owner—doesn’t solve for many gripes your employees may have: flexibility in their work, the ability to take time off and truly check out, for example.

But managers can directly impact an employee’s experience and address those needs. Managers create “little kingdoms” and HR leaders can provide managers with the tools and the script to be benevolent leaders of those kingdoms, she said.

What’s HR to do? Managers are HR’s secret weapon to good culture. Herd recommended checking in with managers and encouraging them to have honest conversations with their direct reports about time off and burnout, or about ideas that individual contributors have about how to best do their work, but otherwise wouldn’t feel comfortable bringing up to a manager unless prompted in a trusted and honest space. HR can provide them with talking points for these conversations and guide them to being more human at work, she said.

“I’ve benefited from going through formal leadership programs or getting leadership development...especially as I moved up the corporate ladder,” Herd said. “You have this whole swath of people that are first-line managers or managers of managers that never get any sort of training. Part of my North Star has been to give that training to those that that literally...need it the most.”