Training your Team’s Managers
Part One
Team Performance Management – The One Big Difference
Let me start by painting a picture. This picture is of a very common scenario that affects very many people as they rise through the ranks of their chosen profession, and it goes like this:
Perhaps you have worked hard within your profession over the past few years, and maybe you have gained a lot of expertize (a combination if knowledge, skills, and experience) in your subject matter area. It is likely that within this time you have been given various promotions, been handed additional responsibilities, and/or been tasked with harder and more complex targets to achieve.
You may well feel confident that you understand your profession well and have a good handle on how to be successful in it. Indeed, you may well have devoted a lot of time and effort over the years in making sure this is the case. Perhaps you have even been recognized and/or rewarded within your company or even more widely within the profession as a whole for the necessary capabilities that you have developed and made such great use of.
But recently a new opportunity has arisen. Your manager has come to you with an offer of a further promotion. But this time there is one, perhaps seemingly minor difference. Whereas before, all promotions you have received have effectively been an increase in seniority, but largely remaining within the same or similar overall role, this time you have been asked to take on something else, something completely different to anything you have done before.
This time, you have been asked to manage a team.
Naturally you want to take the promotion. After all it comes with a salary increase and an executive-sounding title, and perhaps most important of all, it opens the door for a career in management where the only limit to your success will be your own capabilities and limitations. If you want to end up as the CEO someday… well, here’s where you start that journey.
The problem of course, is that whereas (as has already been stated) you have plenty of experience with doing the job itself, you have had no previous experience with managing other people. Still… how difficult can it be, right?
And that, of course, is precisely what we shall be discussing throughout the remainder of this article.
The Pitfall with High Performers Getting Promoted into Managers
Not that it really matters in a way, because you are where you are, but why is it that SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) so often get promoted into becoming people managers? I think there are often a number of factors that contribute to this – some obvious, others perhaps less so – but I think the biggest contributor is usually convenience.
This is perhaps not the most flattering of reasons for being offered a promotion, but nevertheless convenience is often the reason why a particular individual is selected for their rise into people management.
A need to take on a new manager can happen either when an existing manager departs, or when a new managerial role is being created. Either way, there is no incumbent person to perform the role, and instead the company has to find a new person to fill this particular position. One obvious question that the person who is responsible for recruiting for this role is inevitably going to ask themselves is this: “Do we already employ somebody who has the necessary expertize to perform the role?” If you are considered to the top person (or one of the top people) in terms of subject matter expertize, it might seem to the recruiter that you would be an obvious fit.
Doing it this way is fairly straightforward, resource-wise. The company just shifts everyone (including you) up one level, and a new junior is recruited from college or elsewhere to join the team on the ground level.
If the company is not careful, they will just have created a well known and documented phenomenon within their company. This phenomenon is known as…
THE ACCIDENTAL MANAGER
Managerial Training – The Obvious Gets Forgotten in Smaller Businesses
In a big corporation such as, for example, Cisco Systems, there is a very mature and sophisticated HR department that knows more than a thing or two about recruiting. This department is well aware of the above issue, and knows full well that research (and no doubt the direct experience of the company) shows two things:
People who are not properly trained to be people managers do not perform so well as those who are trained.
Not only do Accidental Managers fail to perform well within their own role, but due to the people management aspect of this role, their inadequacies can (and generally will) have a profound effect upon the performance and health of their team.
In fact, a YouGov (an international Internet-based market research and data analytics firm headquartered in the UK, with operations in Europe, North America, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific) survey conducted in 2023 of just under five thousand workers and managers that was commissioned by the CMI (the Chartered Management Institute) found the following:
- 82 per cent of those who enter management positions have not had any proper training prior to taking on the role.
- 26 per cent of senior managers and leaders and 52 per cent of managers also claimed they have had no formal management or leadership training subsequent to taking on the role.
- 31 per cent of managers and 28 per cent of workers have left a job because of a negative relationship with their manager.
Speaking about the results of this research, Ann Francke, CEO of the Chartered Management Institute, said it was “a wake-up call for low-growth, low-productivity and badly managed Britain to take management and leadership seriously”.
Promotions based on technical competence that ignore behaviour and other key leadership traits, according to Francke, have “time and time again” resulted in failures that harm “individuals and their employers, not to mention the wider economy’s performance”.
It could be argued that this is just one piece of recent research, but there are many other research surveys and academic papers that bear out its findings. To my mind, this is undoubtedly an important trend that companies would do well to consider carefully.
This is why larger companies such as Cisco have a whole raft of processes in place. These could include:
- An understanding of what expertize is required for a management or leadership position.
- Procedures to identify potential managers and leaders early on in their careers.
- Help and advice to assist people with determining whether or not a management and leadership type role is for them.
- Special training programs to groom and prepare potential managers and leaders prior to taking on such a role.
- Ongoing training programs for existing managers and leaders to continually refine and improve their capabilities.
- Routine three-hundred-and-sixty-degree feedback systems that help to identify management and leadership problems as quickly as possible.
- Coaching and mentoring programs to help managers and leaders overcome difficulties.
This of course is all very well, but for most small businesses it would be impossible to provide such a wide range of services to the business – the company simply would not have the expertize or resources to do it.
So what should a smaller business do about it? And indeed if you are an “accidental manager” what can you do about it yourself to help fix the issue in a way that is more adapted to the needs of small businesses?
PART TWO COMING NEXT MONTH
In Part Two we will discuss the practical steps small business owners and managers and leader within small businesses can take to provide a considerable boost to team performance and to enhance employee satisfaction (and therefore lifetime) within the business.
