Managers Need Scripts to Say and Do the Right Things

A businessman in a suit and tie holds his glasses and a stack of papers while thinking about what to do and say next — Source: Shutterstock

Published on: April 23, 2025 at 6:43 pm

Inexperienced managers—especially those who didn’t get sufficient training before getting promoted—sometimes struggle to know the right thing to say and do when they encounter common events such as underperforming employees, personal conflicts, and team members who tell them that they’re leaving for another opportunity.

Academy of Management Scholar Carol Kulik of the University of South Australia said that it’s possible to develop scripts to guide managers to respond properly to a range of situations that they’ll have to deal with.

“The script doesn’t have to be fully developed, but it can at least be an entry point to a challenging conversation so that new managers get started off on the right foot,” Kulik said.

For example, when giving performance reviews, Kulik said that one of the worst approaches that managers can take is giving employees a laundry list of six or more things that they need to improve.

“You can’t work on six goals at the same time, so identify the one or two things that you really want the employee to work on and get the employee to tell you an action plan for improving those skills,” Kulik said. “You, as the manager, might know exactly what it takes to improve those skills, but you’re always going to get a lot more buy-in if the employee generates it themselves.

“That’s a very trainable skill that we can give a line manager,” she said. “Sometimes the best thing you can do is to say nothing and encourage the employee to give you a solution that they’re prepared to act on.”

Another tricky situation is when an employee gives their manager notice that they’ve found another job.

“We tell managers, you can always authentically say to any employee, ‘Thank you for the time that you’ve given this company,’” Kulik said. “Now, sometimes managers will say, ‘This employee came and said they were leaving, and I was actually glad to see them go’—sure, but you can still say, ‘Thank you for the time that you’ve given this company.’

“That’s something that you can practice before anyone leaves your team,” she said. “It’s something you can use in any circumstance, for all levels of performance.”

Simply being polite and expressing gratitude for employees’ efforts are underrated management tactics.

“Line managers don’t say ‘thank you’ often enough,” Kulik said. “When we talk to employees, they tell us that gratitude is one of the biggest motivators that they ever experienced at work.

“But very few employees say that they experience gratitude on a regular basis,” she said. “Practice saying, ‘Thank you’—that’s a really nice script to have in your back pocket.”

A sample of Kulik’s AOM research findings:

Author

Daniel Butcher

Daniel Butcher is a writer and the Managing Editor of AOM Today at the Academy of Management (AOM). Previously, he was a writer and the Finance Editor for Strategic Finance magazine and Management Accounting Quarterly, a scholarly journal, at the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA). Prior to that, he worked as a writer/editor at The Financial Times, including daily FT sister publications Ignites and FundFire, as well as Crain Communications’s InvestmentNews and Crain’s Wealth, eFinancialCareers, and Arizent’s Financial Planning, Re:Invent|Wealth, On Wall Street, Bank Investment Consultant, and Money Management Executive. He earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Colorado Boulder and his master’s degree from New York University. You can reach him at [email protected] or via LinkedIn.

View all posts