There is one skill
that every leader and manager needs – and only 10% (maybe) of you have it!
I find it amazing that people appear
surprised at the fact that most leaders and managers aren't very good at their
jobs. And the problem is sufficiently widespread that we even have had a movie
– "Horrible Bosses" – made about the problem. Most people have
experienced at least one, if not a number of, bad bosses, and I felt like I
needed to stick up for the bosses, for a change. And “boss” in this case refers
to business owners, leaders and managers.
You see, it's not their fault. What tends
to happen in most organizations is that somebody who is good at what they do
(their technical skill) gets promoted, or has more work available than they can
manage, so they start employing people. Luckily for them, and most of us, their
first “promotion” is usually into a project supervisory type role where 90% of
their time is spent on applying their technical skill, and only 10% involves
any form of leadership or management. And generally they will also do well in
this kind of environment, which is when it starts to get tricky!
Their next “promotion”, takes them out of
the supervisory role and places them very firmly into a leadership, management
or ownership position. Now they are expected to spend 90% of their time leading
and managing people, and only 10% applying their technical skill.
So let's go back to what made them good at
their technical skill? It will generally be a combination of training, and
experience. And guess what – when they first started out in their junior
technical role, they had just come out of their most intense training period.
The company and the environment then added experience to their training, and
voilà, we had an effective “technician”/employee, who was able to apply what
they had been trained to do in a manner that allowed the company to fulfill its
mission. And the term “technician” here applies across every job description
from burger flipper to actuary, and everything in between.
Spot the difference with the promotion into
management. The unfair assumption is that because the person was good as a
"technician" and in a "supervisory" role, they will be a
good leader and manager. It's unfair because it lands the junior leader in a
situation where they have neither the training, nor the experience, and yet
they are expected to somehow, magically, perform effectively in this new role.
Fortunately, some of you are blessed with natural people-management(the missing
skill!) ability and you will do enough of the right things until, hopefully, you
get the necessary training. And some never do – in many cases senior leaders
have had no leadership and/or management training, and they do not know how to
lead and manage any better then their subordinate managers.
This problem has a natural economic
consequence. Untrained, and under trained, managers are ineffective, and
therefore do not produce the results that the company needs. This means that
budgets need to be cut and one of the first areas that gets the knife is the
training budget, and particularly those things that are regarded as "soft
skills". Which means that junior, or newly promoted, managers receive
little or no training in people management and leadership, which are the two
fundamental skills required in their new role. And so the cycle continues…
There are very few undergraduate or even
graduate programs that cover higher-level communication skills such as conflict
resolution, negotiation, and persuasive communication, and even fewer that
spend enough time on even the basics of interpersonal communication. Values,
vision, and mission are such hazy concepts that most of us feel like they don't
apply at "our level", or even at all. And why, before we even get
there, would we need to know anything about team building, employee engagement,
or effective delegation. Which results in most people being promoted into
leadership and management positions with no coaching or support designed to
systematically add the skills that are needed.
Then we have the very real problem of too
much to do and too little time to do it in, which generally results in new
managers being thrown into the deep end of the leadership pool, where they have
no alternative but to become fear-based leaders, or sink! They have targets to
hit from day one, and no leadership plan or philosophy that they can deploy
other than "make target, or else".
Due to the nature of this problem, most
managers have never even experienced mature, trust-based leadership, and have
no idea what an effective team actually looks like. How to shift their own
management style from fear to trust, and from threat to leadership, is a
complete mystery, and they wouldn't even know where to go to get help.
So, how do we break this cycle? Firstly, we
need to acknowledge the problem exists in our organisation, and secondly, we
need to develop a solution that fits our particular situation. That may start
with creating a "required reading list" of leadership and management
books for all existing, and aspiring/prospective managers. Get some help with the development of the
company values, vision, and mission, so that your leadership team is (at least)
on the same page. Get your managers, and prospective managers, the training
they require to be effective. If your organisation does not have the budget for
external training, or a training department within it’s HR ambit, there are a
large number of on-line training courses available, which can be scheduled to
accommodate a manager’s day-to-day job requirements, and are not prohibitively
expensive. Worldwide, executive coaching has been proven to give the best
overall results in developing effective leaders and managers, primarily because
it facilitates the application of tested and proven leadership and management
principles to the actual situations faced by the leader-in-training. Whichever
option, or combination of options, works best for you will depend on your
individual circumstances, but doing nothing will simply perpetuate the problem
and keep your company locked in the never-ending spiral.
At Version 8, we have identified 10
absolutely fundamental things that every business and manager needs to have in
place, or have an understanding of, in order to be effective. We have combined
them into The Business Success Blueprint, which you can download for free here
- http://bit.ly/2t3vO9R
If you would like any additional help with
solving this problem, connect with us at www.version8.com.au,
or through our Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn feeds. We’d love to design a
customized solution of coaching and training to help transition your great
“technicians” into effective leaders and managers.
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