In politics, time and people are two of our most valuable assets. And whether we’re talking about the inner workings of a candidate campaign or a political consulting firm, where there is dysfunction you are sure to find a misallocation of both of those assets.
Putting the right people in place and then equipping them with strong management skills is absolutely essential for political organizations and firms to thrive. But given the frantic nature of political work, campaigns and organizations often find themselves unable to devote the time and resources to get this right.
Empower Strategies was founded specifically to address this problem. To retain talent and create capacity within your organization, you need to set up your team with essential management structures and train your managers to obtain and master essential skills. Here are three steps your political org or firm should take this cycle to ensure your team is getting this right.
1. Perform An Honest Evaluation of Your Team and Invest in Them
One undeniable reality in the political campaign industry is that managers are often promoted into their roles because they’ve excelled at a specific technical skill or area of expertise, not because of their ability to manage people. In one sense, this is a positive. Unlike some other industries, “middle management” in politics is typically not staffed with individuals whose primary job it is to just manage without a connection to the day-to-day work.
The downside? Managers in politics are also often responsible for managing large teams and sizable budgets. They also are typically thrust into high-level management responsibilities early in their career — largely without the proper training on how to best utilize, motivate, lead, and retain employees.
Start with taking an honest look at your management staff and the teams they’re running. Are projects taking longer than they should? Are managers properly delegating? Do they feel empowered to actually manage? Finding inefficiency or other issues at the management level is normal, and it doesn’t necessarily mean you have a staff problem. But it does mean you need to invest the time and resources to make the managers on your team better.
Effective management training will give leaders more time. When they can properly manage their teams and delegate work down, they’re freed up to tackle more complex problems and high-level work. Teams increase their capacity when managers excel at effectively and efficiently overseeing both their team members and the work product.
2. Focus on Training and Retention
Seven in 10 U.S. workers say they would leave a job if they had a bad manager, according to the latest findings of LinkedIn’s Workforce Confidence survey. Take a minute to think about how many people in the political industry you know who have either left a job, or considered leaving a job, because of a bad manager. I should probably give you five minutes.
Retention is critical for campaigns and political firms. The talent pool is limited in our space, and adjacent industries are always looking to pull that talent away to their, often much larger, organizations or agencies. Additionally, hiring, onboarding, and training talent all suck up valuable time from leaders, leading some firms to neglect these priorities, despite understanding their importance.
Career-pathing (providing clear and visible ways for the individuals on your team to grow with the company) matters for your employees. It means providing ample training opportunities to help your staff grow professionally and prioritizing regular conversations that show employees how they can develop the skills necessary for advancement.
3. Be Intentional About the Skills Your Managers Need
In the political space, even large organizations and firms sometimes don’t have the structure in place to manage people well. When the focus is on winning and producing the highest level of work possible for clients with efficient turnaround, it’s often easy to put off the essentials of good management. But just as good structure and processes will help you retain the best talent on your team, these things will also give your organization or firm the space to do better work for clients.
Scheduled performance reviews with an opportunity for two-way feedback not only demonstrate to employees that management is willing to listen to their concerns, but they also show the organization is invested in their growth. Regular one-on-one meetings, directly with managers, also provide a forum for employees to work through specific issues related to weekly tasks and ongoing projects.
The managers on your team need to be able to provide feedback in a way that’s productive and facilitates employee growth. They also need to be comfortable having difficult conversations with their direct reports in a way that mitigates interpersonal issues or concerns with the quality of work before they create larger problems within your organization.
At Empower Strategies, we’ve developed a system that allows firms to easily implement the structures needed to make all of this an organizational priority. Reach out and start investing in your firm’s future today.
Kate Sours founded Empower Strategies after experiencing first-hand the need for effective recruiting, human resources consulting, and leadership development within politics and many other D.C.-based industries. Empower Strategies can help you hire, manage, train, and retain talent. Reach out here to learn more about our services.
