Life as a manager: what a struggle!

During 2017 and the first few months of 2018, Lenovys interviewed over 500 managers of medium and large Italian companies to understand their problems, needs, margins for growth and improvement, both corporate and personal, and to prepare the 5th edition of the Executive Master in Lean Lifestyle®.

The panel of respondents was broad and composite in terms of age, type and company turnover: 54% of respondents are between 30 and 44 years old, 43% between 45 and 65, and 4% under 30. And after all, this is also a figure on the average age and career in Italian companies.
85% of the sample is a manager in structured companies, while the remaining 15% represents Italian entrepreneurship.

Looking at the companies represented, 44% of the sample consists of businesses with between 100 and 1,000 employees, 15% with more than 1,000 employees, and 36% with between 10 and 100 employees. In terms of revenue, 40% of companies generate less than 50 million euros, 25% between 50 and 100 million euros, 24% between 100 and 500 million euros, and 11% over 500 million euros.

The results of the survey

A landscape emerges of managers who fail to balance their private lives and work, to the detriment of the sustainability of excellent performance and results. Seventy-four percent say they don’t get enough sleep to feel capable of starting the day in top form; their physical fitness is unsatisfactory (so much so that 66% must regain it), but above all, they are great centralizers: only one in five regularly delegates certain tasks to their employees. In 70% of cases, managers even declare that they cannot recharge their batteries even on vacation.

The picture is no longer encouraging if we move on to analyzing the more corporate and team aspects, according to managers:

only 8% of companies know how to conduct meetings effectively
one in five works to ensure a good balance between work and private life
only 5% of companies celebrate and celebrate their results.

For over 60% of those interviewed in the company, proper eating habits are not encouraged, and for over 50%, the leaders of their respective companies have not been professionally developed in a structured way to become teachers and coaches of other people.
For a share close to 70% of the sample, companies offer a sufficiently clear and motivating universe and vision, while those that offer their employees a specific program for teaching advanced problem-solving methodology do not exceed 40%.

Finally, only 40% of the managers and entrepreneurs interviewed declared themselves convinced satisfied with the way they conduct their professional and personal lives.

Over the past 10 years, most Italian managers have been catapulted into a hyperconnected world, and this leap has exponentially increased the complexity of their lives, both private and professional. Many managers are victims of technology and have not understood how to exploit it to simultaneously achieve greater productivity and well-being. They spend more time than necessary on work activities, often with lower-than-expected results and high levels of stress; they struggle to manage teams, and their days are enormously complicated.

– Luciano Attolico –

A training course and concrete tools

Starting with the daily problems highlighted by the survey, the Executive Master Lean Lifestyle® training path was set up, which develops on a 5-level pyramid:

PERSONAL EXCELLENCE: the ability to express the best with minimal effort
ENERGY: the ability to generate energy inside and outside the person through the physical, emotional and mental components and meaning
PEOPLE DEVELOPMENT: the ability to enhance and develop the team’s full potential
VISION: the ability to align people in the company towards shared goals, living truly inspiring values
LIFESTYLE EXCELLENCE: the ability to be an example of excellence in all areas of life.

Born in 2014, it is the only event in Europe concentrated in 6 days with classes in a Medici villa on the outskirts of Florence and set up to offer experiential training aimed at acquiring and regularly applying key behaviors aimed at achieving high performance and individual and team well-being simultaneously.

The goal of our master’s degree is to provide concrete tools to understand how to manage this complexity to regain control of our private and professional lives – Luciano Attolico stated – expressing maximum value, simplifying our days and making the most of the technologies available.