Training Managers In The Things That Really Matter

It’s time to look again at how we train our managers

I am passionate about the importance of managers and the impact they can have, and in this regard I have two related things on my mind. Firstly, management development is really important to productivity and performance in companies across the world, so we shouldn’t ignore that need. Secondly, we need to be more ambitious with what we can expect of our managers, which means we will need to adapt the way we train them.  

So to start with the importance of management development, we need to really begin with why managers matter.  In many companies, being a “middle manager” has become a difficult place to be – under-appreciated and caught between a rock and a hard place – but in truth it’s a vital role at the heart of the overall success of a company, because the vast majority of employees experience the company they work for through their manager much more than through the CEO and the leadership team. Managers don’t just delegate tasks and manage processes, although of course that is part of the role; they drive engagement, performance, retention and productivity. You know this for yourself – a great manager can change how you feel about the work you do, how committed and engaged you feel, how successful you are and where it leads you. In contrast, a bad manager can get the worst from you, can destroy the team, damage performance and undermine morale.  
 
When I talk with managers about becoming a self determined manager, we often talk about the bad things some managers do, and the list of those things now extends to four slides – that’s how much a poor manager can really get it wrong. Managers set the tone for the team and the way they behave impacts every employee who works for them, every day. Which means you can find great teams in badly-run companies or toxic environments, and vice-versa. A manager can insulate the team from a bad company culture, or can damage a team despite the great environment around them. And anecdotally, again based on my conversations with managers, on average just 20% of the managers we have all worked for have left us better in some way.  Which means, (again anecdotally, this is not validated survey data), on average 80% of the managers we work for have no positive impact on us, and possibly have a negative one.  And so if this is at all accurate, even directionally, we have a huge opportunity to improve the way many of our managers impact the people who work for them.
 
Which gets me to management development. Let’s assume that it is offered - and many companies are still hoping that their managers will have picked up how to manage others by simply being managed in the past, or that the fact that they are in a managerial role will somehow confer on them the ability to succeed in it. But where it is offered, most of our management development is, essentially, technical. Processes to follow, tools to use, procedures to understand. Often these are augmented with a section on performance management, something around diversity awareness, possibly a model to help have a difficult conversation. And then, probably, something about coaching. And I think this means that a lot is left unsaid, that there is an implicit assumption made that the power in the role is already clear to the manager, that the simple fact of being a manager means that the responsibility and opportunity of the role is understood.
 
I’ve been spending some time over the past several weeks writing training content associated with the Self Determined Manager, which of course is why this is on my mind. And the more I have reflected, the more I think that we should be doing a lot more to help managers think more broadly about their responsibility.  Their approach to the role, the attitude they bring, the amount of conscious and deliberate effort they should make towards creating an environment of success and outperformance, all merit some focus.
 
So as a starting place, here are five topics that most management development classes usually don’t cover, but should:

 
Those best managers, the ones we all want to work for and the ones that are multipliers of success in our companies, are the ones that create a team environment of outperformance and growth, where people achieve more than they thought they could, have impact in bigger ways than anyone expected, and get learning and growth in big and small ways in return for their hard work and commitment. Being a manager who creates such an environment is a skill and an attitude, and almost every manager can learn how to do it well. We just need to let them know that this, in fact, is their job, help them to approach it in the right way, and help them to develop the skills that they really need to succeed. It’s time to look again at how we train our managers.