What percentage of managers actually know how their teams feel?

Most managers talk to their teams every day, but conversation doesn’t always equal understanding.

We explore the blind spots that can prevent leaders from knowing and understanding how employees feel, and why effective employee listening matters.

If you asked the team members whether their manager really knew how they felt, would you get the same answer?

Conversation and understanding aren’t necessarily the same thing.

“My door is always open” is a phrase we’ve all heard. In most cases, it’s completely genuine.

Good managers want people to speak openly. They want employees to raise concerns, suggest improvements and tell them when something isn’t working. However, an open door only works if people feel comfortable walking through it!

Imagine an employee who is unhappy with their workload; will they tell their manager?

Perhaps, but they might also worry they’ll be seen as unable to cope.

What if they think a new company initiative is making their job harder? Will they challenge it, or assume the decision has already been made?

What if their concern is actually about their manager? Suddenly, that open conversation becomes much more difficult.

Employees consciously or unconsciously make judgements about what is safe to say, how to say it and who to say it to.

So, people edit, they soften their opinions, they avoid the difficult subject and they tell their manager that everything is “fine”. Not necessarily because there’s a bad relationship, but because being willing to listen isn’t always the same as making someone feel able to speak freely.

Silence can be dangerously reassuring

This is where leaders can develop blind spots, when nobody is complaining, so they assume that things must be OK.

Nobody challenged the decision, so everyone must be in agreement.

Turnover statistics aren’t concerning, so people must be happy.

The problem is that an absence of negative feedback isn’t necessarily evidence of positive sentiment.

Sometimes silence is simply silence and disengagement doesn’t always announce itself loudly.; it can be the employee who gradually stops suggesting ideas.

The person who once went above and beyond but now does exactly what’s required.

Perhaps a colleague who used to raise problems but has now decided that there’s little point, or the employee who appears perfectly satisfied, right up until the day they hand in their notice.

By the time the organisation sees a tangible symptom, the underlying concern may have existed for some considerable time.

Managers can’t see everything, and we shouldn’t expect them to

I don’t think this is necessarily a failure of management as managers can only act on what they can see and hear.

Different people communicate in very different ways; the most confident voices in a team meeting aren’t necessarily representative of the whole team. Someone who says very little publicly may have valuable insights that they’re more comfortable sharing privately.

Then add hybrid working to the mix – different shifts, multiple sites, frontline workers and people who don’t spend their day sitting in front of a laptop.

Suddenly, “I talk to my team all the time” becomes considerably more complicated.

And as teams grow, relying purely on individual conversations becomes even harder.

A good manager can be doing everything right and still have blind spots. And recognising that isn’t a weakness, it’s actually a sign of good leadership.

Conversation gives us stories. Listening gives us patterns

Nothing should replace genuine human conversation.

A survey can’t notice that someone doesn’t seem themselves.

Data can’t replace an empathetic one-to-one and a dashboard shouldn’t manage people.

But structured employee listening can reveal something, when done correctly, that individual conversations sometimes can’t, and that’s patterns.

• Are people becoming less confident about the direction of the business?
• Is workload becoming a recurring concern?
• Does one part of the organisation experience things differently from another?
• Are people comfortable challenging decisions?
• Is sentiment changing?

These are questions that become much easier to explore when leaders combine human conversations with regular, structured opportunities for employees to have their say and be heard.

Anonymous feedback can also provide another route for someone who doesn’t yet feel comfortable raising something face-to-face.

The objective isn’t to replace good management with data but to give good managers better insight.

An important catch

We’ve written about this many times before – sending a survey doesn’t mean you’re listening. In fact, repeatedly asking employees what they think and then doing nothing with the answer can potentially be worse than not asking at all.

We’ve probably all experienced it.

The staff survey arrives and everyone is encouraged to take part; some will and some won’t. Then, the results disappear somewhere into the organisation.

And, six or twelve months later, another survey lands.

Real listening needs a feedback loop, not a doom loop!

Ask. Listen. Understand. Act. Communicate. Then ask again.

That doesn’t mean leaders have to agree with every piece of feedback because sometimes the answer will be no as there may be commercial, practical or regulatory reasons why something can’t change.

But employees deserve to know that what they said was heard and how it was considered. “We heard you, but here’s why we can’t change this” is a great response.

Silence isn’t!

Perhaps managers don’t need all the answers

Maybe the expectation that great managers should instinctively know what everyone is thinking is part of the problem. They won’t, and pretending otherwise risks creating the very blind spots we’re trying to remove.

The strongest managers aren’t necessarily those who can confidently tell you exactly how their people feel, they’re the ones curious enough to recognise that they might not know.

Recognising that gap means giving people different ways to speak and be heard. A worker voice programme, a structured approach to gathering and responding to employees’ views, can bring those opportunities together:

• Formal and informal
• Named and anonymous
• Individual and collective

Managers can then listen to the people who speak loudly while also finding ways to hear from those who don’t.

And when they discover something uncomfortable, they don’t immediately become defensive.

They become curious.

• What’s causing this?
• What have I missed?
• What can we do differently?

That is where employee listening becomes much more than an engagement exercise, it becomes a management tool in understanding how employees feel.

So, what percentage of managers actually know how their teams feel?

I’m now not convinced that the percentage is the most useful question!

There’s perhaps a much simpler one I’d ask any manager:  “How do you know?”

If the answer is based primarily on conversations with the people who already feel comfortable speaking up, there’s probably another part of the story that we’re not hearing.

And sometimes, what isn’t being said is every bit as important as what is.

What is your workforce not telling you?