Building and maintaining a respectful workplace requires manager involvement in critical but often complex situations:
- Preventing harassment by calling out inappropriate behavior, reinforcing professional boundaries, and handling complaints
- Sharing concerns promptly about systems and procedures, leadership issues, and alarming behaviors
- Contributing ideas that help build inclusion and engagement
- Initiating and navigating difficult conversations with direct reports
When managers are reluctant to do these things, important initiatives can stall.
What is Manager Reluctance?
When managers know the right thing to do, but hesitate to do it. The video clip below shows what it can look like:
Clip from Uncomfortable Conversations © Atana 2024-2025
Preview Uncomfortable Conversations Course
When managers know the right thing to do, but hesitate to do it. The video clip below shows what it can look like:
Clip from Uncomfortable Conversations © Atana 2024-2025
Preview Uncomfortable Conversations Course
It's more common than you think. Atana research shows that even managers who've been trained on respectful workplace behaviors and are supportive of the initiative report having many restrictive perceptions and behavioral attitudes. Here are just a few examples:
- 54% say they keep concerns to themselves rather than share with others
- 44% hesitate to contribute ideas or give input
- 37% don’t feel personal responsibility for addressing inappropriate behavior in the workplace
- 34% are uncomfortable having difficult conversations with direct reports (so they are more apt to avoid these conversations)
What's Behind the Reluctance?
Driven by established principles of behavioral science, and through behavioral questions embedded in our courses, Atana has found that the kinds of restrictive perceptions and attitudes listed above can be indicative of issues hiding beneath the surface of an organization, such as:
- Low psychological safety
- Perception that behavioral standards are applied inconsistently
- Managers don’t feel valued
- Lack of confidence in applying certain skills or behaviors
All are factors that, when present in the organization, undermine critical KPIs like engagement, innovation, productivity, retention, and litigation mitigation.
Identifying and addressing these barriers changes everything
Because Atana gathers learner input in the context of respectful workplace training, you get 100% participation as well as learner responses that are more genuine than those gathered through traditional methods like out-of-context engagement studies or random pulse surveys.
After training, your organization’s results can be easily viewed at the organizational level, or at the level of team/department/location/job function. We’ll help you interpret the data on your dashboard so you can use your data to drive follow-up steps targeted to specific areas of need.
As fear and reluctance are replaced with trust and engagement, you’ll see:
1) Reduced manager stress
2) Greater ROI on respectful workplace culture initiatives
3) Improved organizational outcomes in critical KPI areas
