The role of the manager today
The new changes to the workplace weren’t regular aspects of everyday work in the past. Few companies had remote workers. The ones that did allow their employees to work remotely only offered work-from-home days a couple of times per month as an extra benefit.
Managers were used to the same in-office routines and rarely had to deal with connectivity issues or making sure their team stays engaged with low supervision. Diversity and inclusion were also optional and the case of the empathetic leader never made the headlines.
In 2020 alone, every country went through different levels of change. This calls for separate sets of roles and initiatives to get people back on track and maintain a thriving workplace.
Besides matching the customs of a new population, you also have to adapt your management style to suit the employees in that respective country.
Training, corporate inequality opposition, or how decisions are made will all be influenced by the ins-and-outs of every culture.
In Europe, every country has its own management particularities.
These particularities are powered by different cultures, upbringings, labor laws, and economic conditions. Understanding these is a top priority for managers as regional influences drive behavioral choices, like working collaboratively or independently.
Take Germany for instance. Managers here prefer to stay humble and avoid getting all the attention as organizations limit the differences between team members. Similarly, French managers focus on their people first. Other European countries follow with huge demands for creative and innovative individuals in leadership roles.
These traits are needed to prevent the business from stalling, and maintain well-trained, happy talent.
So managers across Europe get more time and opportunities to center their plans around training their team and reaching their goals. Moreover, leadership is seen as a group effort. Every individual has their say when it comes to the decision-making process, workflow optimization, and culture management.
On the other hand, leadership in the U.S. is one person’s duty.
As a result, employees here are more focused on a company’s culture, work relations, and upper management. Platforms such as Glassdoor and frequent queries like “culture”, “talent”, “leadership”, “CEO”, or “management” after a company’s name help candidates assess whether they’re applying for the right job or not.
This shows how much U.S. employees care about the work conditions they’ll be a part of and how valuable leadership truly is for them.
As Europeans train their managers through HR programs that teach them to maintain balanced teams, U.S. leaders have stayed rather individualistic to encourage innovation and culture fit when hiring. The latter focus on every single person and how the individual helps the overall team and its projects.
Even at the beginning of 2020, the overall corporate culture in North America was a predominantly caring one — focused on bringing out the best results and achievements in every person.
This proved helpful in fully-remote situations as individual leadership made it easier for managers to adapt to new challenges.
From home, team members experienced their own struggles that European managers found harder to spot with feedback surveys and one-on-one meetings not being as popular as in the U.S.
Note that Western European firms started showing their interest for these practices in the past years too even if they hadn’t yet become customary.