Traditionally, the summer season is when leaders and employees take some much-needed time off work to relax and recharge their batteries. A wealth of research shows that downtime in the form of a vacation is essential for avoiding burnout, but how many of us return to our desks suffering from post-holiday blues and fall straight back into a cycle of busyness and overwhelm?

Workers across the globe are more stressed than ever before. The 2024 Gallup ‘State of the Global Workplace’ study found that 41% of employees report ‘experiencing a lot of stress’, and just 23% of employees are actively engaged in their work. And leaders aren’t exempt either, with a massive 53% of managers suffering from burnout, according to Microsoft’s World Trend Index report.

None of this is surprising given the global realignment of personal values and the expectations we hold about our work and careers post-Covid, and only reflects a growing sense that our workplaces are not happy places to be. While the Gallup report makes for sombre reading, it did reveal that some organisations have reached much higher levels of engagement and wellbeing – and it identified that good leadership is the key to transforming the workplace into a happier, more productive place.

The accidental manager crisis

In the UK, as in many other countries, managers are often promoted because they’re good at their job. As many as 82% of managers have no formal training – and, according to the Chartered Management Institute, have found themselves catapulted into managing people without having learned the critical management or people engagement skills to be effective in their new role.

These “accidental managers” are the reason almost one in three employees quit their jobs. Again, Gallup’s 2024 report states, "The best organisations hire managers with a talent for engaging their teams, and they train their managers into effective coaches who consistently deliver meaningful individual feedback that inspires better future performance.”

But how can managers learn to adopt more coaching-related behaviours to re-engage their teams?

One effective way is by learning to ask powerful questions. Many ‘accidental managers’ default to a ‘fix and solve’ management approach, believing this to be what’s required of them. They draw certainty from the fact they’re in control and adding value as they take on the day-to-day challenges instead of enabling employees to resolve the problem themselves.

Although this may temporarily ‘fix’ the problem, the employee hasn’t learned or grown from the experience—micro-managing employees in this way can lead to disengagement. But this can be flipped on its head if managers learn to adopt an enquiry-led approach and have ‘in the moment’ coaching conversations with their employees instead.  A new management model—STAR®—is key to changing management behaviour in a split second to engage employees in thinking through the issues they face.

• STOP – when an employee comes to you with a problem, as their manager, you must learn to stop and step back, allowing you to change your state when responding to different situations. This places the control over the situation back in your hands.
• THINK – once you have been able to STOP, you have the ability to THINK about whether the situation an employee has presented is a coachable moment.
• ASK – If you’ve sensed that it is a coachable moment, then being able to master the art of asking powerful, thought-provoking questions and actively listening to your employees allows you to ditch your habitual ‘fix and solve’ response and instead present the other person with a learning opportunity enabling them to become independent, solution-driven problem solvers.
• RESULT – as a manager, it is your responsibility to achieve a positive result from such an interaction. For continuous performance improvement, you must approach the conversation openly and empathetically, allowing the employee to imagine themselves taking the action before agreeing on a next step that you can then follow up on.

Again, the STAR® model chimes with the 2024 Gallup report, which found that successful organisations “integrate engagement into every stage of their employee and manager lifecycle.” Active listening is crucial; managers can demonstrate to employees that they’re engaged by showing that they’re present in the moment and focused on what the employee is saying.

Feeling listened to and understood is very powerful and has knock-on benefits in building confidence and fostering a sense of belonging. And this works both ways. By empowering employees to problem-solve for themselves, the manager is building a better, stronger team and improving the organisational culture. This is key to engagement (as well as removing the pressure on managers to have all of the answers all of the time).

Bringing coaching into the flow of work

The STAR® model is part of a new approach to management called Operational Coaching®, because it brings coaching into the flow of work. The results of a recent UK-government-sponsored randomised-control trial conducted by the London School of Economics and Political Sciences (LSE) into this approach proved (statistically significantly) that managers who adopted an Operational Coaching® style spent 70% more time coaching team members in the flow of work than before. Their capabilities also improved across all nine management competencies measured, contributing to a six-fold improvement in employee retention.

The Gallup report noted that engaged organisations “emphasise wellbeing at work”. While new initiatives such as the right to request flexible working, free wellbeing apps, ‘duvet days’ and so on might give the impression that employees are well cared for, wellbeing is about more than this.

For employees to feel happy at work, they must feel enthused by their work and have the autonomy and confidence to do their best work. Positive work culture is cultivated by managers – only by investing in them can organisations reverse declining employee engagement statistics and make workplaces happier places to be.

As the 2024 Gallup poll states: “When organisations do these things, they simultaneously improve employees’ lives and organisational performance.” And that can only benefit us all.

Dominic Ashley-Timms and Laura Ashley-Timms are the CEO and COO of performance consultancy Notion, creator of the multi-award-winning and internationally certified  STAR® Manager programme used by managers in over 40 countries. They are also the co-authors of the new management bestseller The Answer is a Question.