Management Leverage Blog

Today’s post is written by  David Kasprzak. Check out his blog over at My Flexible Pencil.

Over the years, I’ve encountered several managers who place a premium on training.  That is, they believe that training is very expensive and serves as a distraction, so you should do it sparingly.

The problem is even worse when it comes to training new managers.  I had a conversation once with a newly-minted manager who took a couple of days to attend a leadership development seminar.  When he returned, he raved about the program to the company’s HR department.  Those folks also became enthusiastic, and were looking to send more people to the seminar in hopes of introducing people to innovative leadership styles.

Sadly, the young manager’s superiors got wind of his zeal, and quickly admonished him.  They were afraid the time spent on developing his leadership skills was becoming a distraction, and that he needed to spend more time managing his team.  After all, the team needed his direction to move forward and would be stuck for days, making mistakes, if he wasn’t there to take care of them.

In no other position would we ask a person to take on their new role without developing their skills.  If we ask an operator to work on a new machine, we make sure she understands the new role and the machine thoroughly, for both safety and effectiveness reasons, not to mention efficiency.  Accountants and other professionals are constantly trained and re-certified.  Once promoted to management, however, the need to keep developing skills and learning new ones to do the job better somehow, magically, goes away?

I believe the thinking is that only those who already have the innate ability to lead others are selected for promotion in the first place.  Therefore, they simply need to exercise those capabilities, rather than hone them or develop new ones.  Unfortunately, this ends up being nothing more than a strict dedication to the status quo, and doesn’t lead to the innovations necessary for future prosperity, or even survival.

Managers need to continue to learn and grow as much as the people they manage.  In any position within an organization, a few hours or days spent learning to do the current job, or even a future job, better, benefits the individual as well as the group.

If people are so overloaded that they can’t continue to grow and learn new skills away from the office once in a while, that’s indicative of much greater problems.  Unfortunately, without exposure to new ideas, no one will know the countermeasures that can be employed to combat them.

Photo Credit: doug88888