Accidental Managers Will Happen

A report from the UK Chartered Management Institute (CMI) has identified that 82% of bosses have not had any formal management training. The survey, reported by The Guardian, questioned 4,500 workers and managers. It pointed to wide concern at the poor quality of these ‘accidental managers’. The CMI Director of Policy, Anthony Painter, said that better management is required to prevent the development of toxic workplace cultures, to improve the UK’s economic performance and to aid public services reform.

The two major reasons in the view of Real-World Management are that many leaders do not recognise the importance of skilled specialist management, and that many individuals wish to become managers for the wrong reasons and attach limited importance to the development of expert management skills.

The management function does not provide a one-way ratcheted path to progress. It is a swinging hammer that can propel an organisation either forwards or backwards – so it must be properly deployed and aligned. Excellent managers through their skills and behaviours greatly benefit top-line performance: productivity, profit, customer satisfaction, staff satisfaction and retention, growth, and societal contribution. But delivered poorly, management can start a spiral of decline. As the saying goes, people more often leave managers than leave organisations. In the worst cases, personality-unfitted managers exhibiting negative characteristics including aspects of the dark triad identified by Delroy Paulhus and Kevin Williams – Machiavellianism, psychopathy and narcissism – can cause untold damage.

Individuals aspiring to management roles can be motivated more by the financial compensation, perks and perceived status than by the opportunity to develop vital specialist skills. Forward looking organisations develop parallel development avenues with matched compensation so that skilled individual contributors can remain in direct operational work. Staff can see status deriving from the possession of a reporting function on other staff (and the avoidance of becoming a reportee to a rival) and from generally being more in-the-know.  Individuals who practice schmooze can see the management ladder as easier to climb than others. It is not unusual for patronage to be a major factor in appointments. Staff desiring management roles for the wrong reasons are unlikely to have training at the top of their agendas. The identification of genuine management potential and the putting in place of professional on-boarding and development programmes should be central to human resource planning and talent strategies.

The absence of training is symptomatic of a more general cavalier attitude to the appointment of managers. Management in the UK is still seen far too widely as administration, as keeping things going. A belief exists that generally intelligent and well-educated individuals automatically make good managers: they don’t. The culture of the gifted amateur has not been eradicated.

Management in the UK remains too little understood. It seems that there is a pervasive incuriosity it. Anne Francke of the CMI identifies that management does not appear to be a priority for politicians and does not feature strongly in policy announcements. Excellent managers are stars but have a weak profile in the public consciousness.

This issue is not chopped liver. Managers – proclaim the importance of your role from the rooftops! There are still far too many Accidentals waiting to happen.