People-management skills have a profound influence on employee engagement, performance, and retention. However, if you are like most managers, you’ve probably received little or no training in people management. Not surprisingly, recent surveys from a variety of professional sources have catalogued the lost productivity and worker stress resulting from poorly trained managers.

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Over the course of my career as a professor, researcher, and consultant to management I have read countless articles, white papers, and books on the role of the manager in the modern workplace. But I have yet to come across a comprehensive guide to improving day-to-day people-management skills written expressly for managers.

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Jack Wiley is just the person to fill this void. For the past 35 years of his career, Jack has been focused on getting answers to questions about what employees really want from their employers, CEOs, coworkers, and immediate bosses. He chose a novel path for generating these answers—he simply asked employees directly. Oddly, this had never been done before. His first book from this stream of research was entitled RESPECT, Delivering Results by Giving Employees What They Really Want. RESPECT answered the question of what employees most want from the organizations for which they work and showed how organizations who provide a superior employee experience enjoy higher levels of customer satisfaction and greater financial returns.

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In The Employee-Centric Manager, Jack follows the same path by asking over 80,000 employees worldwide this simple question: “What is the most important thing you want from your immediate manager?” The analysis of this resulting mass of data produced a framework of eight attributes employees most frequently identify as their “wants” in a manager. But Jack did not stop there. In this book he also shows how being the kind of manager employees prefer connects to higher levels of employee engagement and enhanced team productivity. 

 

Jack has masterfully converted the simplicity of his findings into useful advice he offers to managers and leaders. This book provides thoughtful, practical, and easy-to-implement actions that managers and leaders can take right now to boost managerial effectiveness and improve employee productivity and retention. If you are a manager or leader who is interested in improving your effectiveness and your employees’ work experience, you have picked up the right book. 

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Charles A. Scherbaum, PhD 
Professor of Industrial and Organizational Psychology 
Department of Psychology 
Baruch College, City University of New York