Hello everyone and welcome to the Squiggly Careers podcast. I'm Helen and I'm Sarah and we are your hosts. We are here every week talking about all things careers, giving you some ideas for action, some tools to try out to help you take a little bit more control of your career development and have a bit of confidence in doing it too. Squiggly careers are

always full of ups and downs and we want to be your support behind the scenes to help you.

And today we're going to talk about how to be a good manager. You might not be a manager,

but maybe you can pick up some tips that you could talk to your manager about. Imagine that.

Imagine if everyone listening, just goes to their manager and says, I think you should listen to this.

I mean, that would be feedback, wouldn't it? Yeah, maybe think about how you might approach that

conversation. But maybe you do want to be a manager in the future or there might be some other

ideas for action that you could think about what you could take away and put into your teams.

But I think one of the things that Sarah and I recognize is that our careers are so dependent on the people that we work for and anything that we can do to create environments where managers can be at their best helps us to be at our best too.

So I do think it is definitely worth listening to this if you

are a manager, but also it helps us to have a bit more understanding of how we might be able to help

managers too if you are not a manager yet. So one of the scary stats, and I think it is a scary

stat, I think that's how it should be branded, particularly if you are a manager, when you hear

this stat, I just remember always thinking it puts

even more pressure on, you're already probably feeling quite pressured.

But most research does say that roughly around 70% of the variance in employee engagement,

so sort of how much people are enjoying the work that they do, depends directly on the person

they are working for.

I can hear the discomfort in your voice when you say that quote and that stat.

Well, partly, you know, that stat is a little bit old now, but I still think I have read

quite a lot of stuff more recently that reinforces that that is probably true roughly, as in

managers do have a really big impact on our day

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