“It’s too noisy in here! I just can’t focus on my work.”

“Why do the patient referral forms keep moving? How am I supposed to get anything done around here?”

“I’ve been here three years, and I don’t have a clue how I am doing. I rarely see my boss.”

“I hate this project. Why can’t I work on something more interesting?”

Is there any chance that any of your employees could be whispering similar things in the break room? When you are a manager, sometimes it is all too easy to lose touch with what your employees really need to thrive and improve their own personal accountability. When you are focused on your own performance and bottom line, it can be tricky to focus on developing effective management development strategies that meet the needs of your employees.

One common complaint from employees in a wide range of industries and work settings is the lack of feedback and guidance from their busy managers. If you wish to improve personal accountability for both yourself and your employees, and you wish to improve the performance of your entire department, then it is important to regularly review performance goals with each employee and openly discuss ways in which your employees are exceeding your mutual expectations as well as how they are falling short.

Regular face-to-face communication in general is essential to positive management development. In order to be effective, employees thrive on positive and constructive feedback. They also need to hear from their managers about upcoming challenges, changing policies, important events, and the like in a timely manner. If you can’t communicate such information that is important to job performance, then it is almost certain that employees will fail to meet your performance goals, because they won’t know where the bar is set.

And no matter what industry you are in, your management development is certain to be much more effective if your unit is well-organized, if expectations are clear, if communication is open, if employees are engaged in projects that are a good fit for their skills and interests, if employees are given opportunities to learn and grow, and if the physical environment is conducive to a productive workday.