One of Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits is sharpening the saw. If you run a business or manage people you can take this concept and not only apply it to yourself, you can also apply it to the people that work for you. Last week, I talked about an article that was written that extolled the virtues of how managers get in the way of success. The real question is whether or not management is truly to blame for productivity. Today I want to look at another reason why management fail to get results.
Have you ever bought something and not taken care of it? I have and I know other people who have. If you have ever tried to use a knife that wasn’t sharp or drive a car without oil (don’t judge me) then you know that if you don’t take care of your things then they don’t work as well as they should.
Managers are no different. We promote a star employee to manager and then let that new manager figure things out on their own. In fact, I am extremely familiar with that because I was once in this position. I was promoted to manager at a young age, was arrogant and thought that I had it all figured out. What I learned was that I didn’t and that I sucked at being a manager. What I also realized was that my company wasn’t necessarily going to give me all of the tools that I needed so I had to get help if I was going to succeed.
What would happen if we took these same new leaders, like myself in the above situation, and actually trained them to be effective in their new roles? Had I had some support and training early on it would have sped up my learning curve dramatically. We need managers and leaders with emotional intelligence, humility, drive and the ability to collaborate with others. These things can be taught at varying levels. For most companies, their management training program consists of people working in the job until they can prove that they can do an above average job. Then they get promoted to manager. After that it’s more of a choose your own adventure with the choices being sink or swim.
Can managers get in the way of success? Absolutely. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Take the time and train your leaders how to manage people in a way that inspires those around them to want to work hard for their teams. Prepare your leaders for success and watch the results they get.
If you are a business owner who wants more effective managers or you want to take your management to the next level, reach out to me here and let’s set up a time to talk about what I can do for you and your team.
Why Fire Your Managers When Training Them Will Do – http://t.co/tjV9T6aUvj
Sure, these things can be taught and anyone can be trained to manage. But shouldn’t we spend our time, and focus on the things that we are exceptional at? I mean, that star employee has just spent 10,000+ hours on mastering some set of skills and got his recognition and promotion to a position that requires a completely different set of skills. His career can’t grow without the promotion to a manager position, that’s where, IMHO, the problem with the top-down hierarchy is. One of my colleagues has recently sent me a link to a good article (in Russian) on “Why Nokia failed”, promoting excellent engineers to management positions, so they had no time for keeping up with technologies, managing people and countless number of ‘important’ meetings, was a big part of that failure. I like one “Forest” analogy that shows the difference between specialists and managers – the specialists are mostly trained to grow a tree of any form and shape, whereas the managers are educated and skilled in finding the best observation point to see the forest as a whole. The bigger the forest, the farther (from the forest & other specialists) should be the observation point. That distance is something the specialists have difficulties with. 😉
Andrejs,
You are correct. We spend too much time promoting talent to positions that they shouldn’t be in as their talents are better spent elsewhere. I am talking about training people who want to be a manager. For those who are worried about advancement, the only way to advance any other way is to go out on your own. That’s the tough part about being an employee, you have to take what the employer gives you which is not always ideal.
Great article for business owners: – Why Fire Your Managers When Training Them Will Do – http://t.co/SL9qAFziuL
RT @derickvanness1: Great article for business owners: – Why Fire Your Managers When Training Them Will Do – http://t.co/SL9qAFziuL