Question
I just caught up with one of your recent articles, Is an exit interview worth $25? Or is it a cockroach? I couldn’t agree more. I think I’d rather have a cockroach for a pet than see another exit interview report! And this brings up the problem of management training.
Management without management training
I spent most of my 40-year career as a technician and the last 17 years in supervision and management. I was promoted to management because of my skills as a good technician and work ethic. I got a management job as a reward, not because I was ready to manage. In other words, I was promoted for the wrong reasons. Through my own diligence and hard work, I became a better manager and I feel I’m a pretty good one. But it took a long time and the effort was mostly on my part — not because my company taught me.
As a senior manager and former Director of Operations, I’ve seen quite a bit. For example, the entire concept of exit interviews is embarrassing. In these meetings employees usually view themselves more positively than their company and manager do, and I suppose that’s natural, but it points to the biggest problem in the workforce today — the lack of leadership and management training.
I do the management training
Today I work hard to mentor my staff. I try to promote people into management because they are ready to manage, not to recognize their technical accomplishments.
The real problem? Companies don’t train managers to manage. They don’t teach them how to develop people, evaluate talent, or help employees grow. They don’t teach communication, coaching, or leadership. They just hand out titles.
It’s really tough being a manager today. I’ve taken Organizational Behavior courses to fill the gaps myself. I personally provide the management training. I promote people only when they’re ready to manage — not because they’re good technicians.
But most managers? They conduct performance reviews using HR’s canned scoring sheets. They communicate only when HR requires them to. They wait until the exit interview to ask the questions they should have asked every month.
Your article hit home. Companies need to invest in management training and real communication. Exit interviews and canned reviews accomplish nothing.
Your thoughts?
Nick’s Reply
Thanks for pretty much writing this column for me. All I did was add some subtitles for you and my own spare notes.
You’ve nailed the core dysfunction in modern business: companies don’t train managers to manage. They train them to fill out forms. And then HR wonders why employees leave.
Lack of employee development
Companies keep promoting top technicians, engineers, analysts, and specialists into management because they’re “good workers.” That’s not a qualification — it’s a shortcut. It’s also a way to avoid investing in real leadership development. All those pretty managers won’t save the company.*
You’re right: most managers are promoted for the wrong reasons. And once they’re promoted, they’re left alone to sink or swim. Some figure it out. Most don’t.
My buddy Peter Cappelli at Wharton has been hammering on this for years: companies have abandoned employee development. They’ve outsourced it to “self-directed learning,” “online modules,” and “HR frameworks.” (See Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs.)
But developing people is a manager’s job. And companies don’t teach managers how to do it. (See The mark of a promotable employee.)
You’re doing what good managers do: mentoring, evaluating, coaching, and promoting based on readiness — not technical achievement. That’s leadership.
Now we need more managers to follow your lead.
Polling all managers: Did any employer ever teach you how to manage people? Did you learn on your own? Does your boss actually communicate with you and manage you and act as your mentor for career growth? Does your employer provide training and development? Is there a management vacuum?
*With apologies to Cormac McCarthy’s excellent novel!)
: :
I learned to be a manager by being a student of management — both the good and the bad — throughout my career. I really focus on the techniques of the managers who helped me grow professionally. I also recall a colleague who was promoted to AVP and given a large team to manage and no management training. Basically task-oriented, she became a micromanager and prompted a mass exodus of talent, and later was demoted.
@Gerrit: Micromanagement is a common strategy for people thrown into the deep end without any training. They seem to think “The more I make it clear I’m involved in everything the higher marks I’ll get.”
Bad for the new manager, bad for the staff and bad for the company.
I would also say that companies confuse management with leadership. There is a distinct difference and companies need both, not one or the other. This is one of the leading causes of dissatisfaction (retired military here, I was fortunate to be around people who did both for many years – so I know the difference and how the two work together).
I have been a manager for 30 years and have never worked in a company that actually teaches or prepares one to be a manager. Most companies are just looking for a task master. They don’t invest time or money into developing an organization.
This writer hits the nail on the frickin’ head. Several times. Let me tell you why, and what I’d add.
For context, I’m a veteran organizational trainer and consultant who’s spent 25 years developing leaders in multiple industries across the U.S. and in six other countries. I am a professor in a business school who teaches organizational behavior and HR management in a major state university. And, I was once a high potential individual contributor who was prematurely promoted to management in a dysfunctional organization with little support.
As an itinerant consultant, I actively participated in organizations’ growing preference for outsourcing essential functions (like talent and leadership development) instead of doing them in-house. One of the results is an increase in leader incompetence and org corruption as you point out. What devastates me is that many of my 20-year-old undergrads assume this is just “how the world works” because that’s all they’ve experienced.
But the problem isn’t just that we dole out promotions as rewards for jobs well done. It’s also that we attach status, power, and higher pay to those positions. In an era where working and middle class folks make far less than we did in the 1970s (the Drucker ratio of 1:20 — worker pay to CEO pay — was the norm until then, and critical for a stable society. Now it’s 1:200 – 800) and income inequality has increased into the danger zone, “lower level” employees are increasingly incentivized to pursue these jobs by any means necessary. This favors people with “dark triad” sociopathic traits, which is why sociopaths are overrepresented the higher you go in any organization.
Also, major research conducted by Korn Ferry, one of my former employers, shows that the biggest point of failure for employees moving “up the ladder” is precisely when they move into middle management. Why? Because the skills needed to succeed at higher levels of leadership (social, strategic) are *totally* different from the skills needed to succeed as ICs or frontline supervisors (technical).
Essentially, we reward people for being excellent at a job by giving them a totally different job — for which they might not even be suited! When these managers fail, it’s costly to the bottom line, morale, productivity, efficiency — all the metrics that matter. And yet most orgs still view these failures as individual deficiencies instead of an indictment of a dumb (and expensive) system. Then they waste more money hiring expensive coaches to fix the problem they caused.
So, the problem isn’t just the lack of developing high potential employees or new managers. The problem is also the lack of properly identifying who is best suited for those roles.
For instance, I learned the hard way that I am not a good frontline supervisor. The required skills aren’t in my zone of genius, nor am I particularly interested in developing them. However, I’m a brilliant manager of managers, which I also enjoy. But, since we’ve set up a false hierarchy where one doesn’t generally get to the “manager of managers” level without first moving up from a supervisor role, many potentially skilled leaders never find their sweet spot, and orgs miss out on their skills. Our system is akin to requiring employees to pass algebra before being allowede to take calculus. But unlike in math, the knowledge isn’t transferable. It’s a different skillset!
The way out? Create flatter, more humane pay scales to de-incentivize promotions being used as rewards. And shift to the mindset earlier humans had about leadership. Specifically, fill leadership roles by matching aptitude with required skills (or randomly, check out “sortition”!) and decouple leadership from power. The notion that having more people “under you” should grant you more money and power is an empire-and slavery-mentality, and not universal in human history. (In fact, thinking this way is so ingrained in modern humans, many readers probably think my last few sentences are bonkers. But that’s the reaction earlier humans had to our way of life, and we’ve got ample evidence ours is far more bonkers, harmful, and unsustainable. We can do things differently — our ancestors already did.)
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk (lol) and thank you, Nick and writer, for raising this critical topic!
@Susana: I could highlight half your post – it’s that good, that insightful and that scary. But I think this points out the most dangerous aspect of how people are “promoted” into management jobs they cannot handle:
…income inequality has increased into the danger zone, “lower level” employees are increasingly incentivized to pursue these jobs by any means necessary. This favors people with “dark triad” sociopathic traits, which is why sociopaths are overrepresented the higher you go in any organization.
This is the old reliable “follow the money” revelation about where business goes fatally wrong.
You’ve designed a wonderful, potent TED Talk! I encourage you to flesh this out into an article and get it published.
@Nick aw shucks. Thank you! I just might …
Brilliant TED talk!
I wish I could add something, but you nailed it.
Thanks for sharing.
I started out in management because my manager was terrible and either I stepped or had to deal with it. Initially, I was bad. Not as bad as my predecessor, but I recognized that I was not good. My company did offer training, but I had to push to get in.
After a few years, I was asked to move into another organization as part of fixing a disaster. I was not going to be in charge, but I was going to be working for the person recognized as being the top manager in the organization. He mentored me to take over for him. The organization succeeded, I took over, and tried to do the same and sent a number of people off to be relatively successful managers.
I am in a different organization now, but what frustrates me the most is not the lack of management training. I can work around that. It is correcting the attitude of, “we are too busy to fix this problem in the long term.”. That is an IC attitude. Managers need to take the time to apply the long term fix. That was something I learned very late.
@Just Me: Your conclusion reminds me of something the chairman of Japan’s NEC Corp said during a worldwide broadcast to all his employees when one asked what one thing he’d like to get across to the thousands assembled. He said, “Our company must go on forever.”
That’s long term! And it’s a declaration the likes of which I’ve never heard since from any leader in any domain public or private.
I recall reading somewhere that between 80 to 85 percent of those elevated to management are unsuited for that role. My personal experience in eight companies ranging from very small to very large pretty much confirms that. And as you said, most are promoted without any evidence of proficiency or training. No wonder the results are so dismal. I think the Peter Principle strongly alludes to this, implying too many rise into positions for which they had no demonstrated aptitude or preparation. I suspect your 20 something undergrads would find this “ancient” book surprisingly relevant.
Many tech companies claim to have equivalent managerial and technical (guru) professional tracks. But the latter often appear to be more imaginary than real. Some seem to escape this rigid promotion system by consulting or contracting.
A phrase my boss uses is “failing up.”
His MBA-worthy theory of management is half the people in management leadership roles are unqualified for a variety of reasons.
These people fail.
Half fail down. Fired. Demoted. Back to actually doing something productive.
The other half fail up. They can not be left in their current role. But because of luck, connection, clean living, or the alignment of the cosmos, they get promoted. Or take a higher role at another company.
Occasionally when we talk, I find myself wanting to argue his point. Then he says something brilliant and insightful like “Look around.”
Oops! This was intended as a reply to Susana Rinderle.
I saw it, thank you Stevie! The Peter Principle is a great example of how art (satire in this case) accurately speaks truth. Thanks for adding this — it seems this post has really inspired a lot of dialogue and emotions, which is good. It means good people are deeply bothered by the status quo, as we should be, and want change!
@Stevie: Glad someone brought up the Peter Principle! What’s old is new!
In just over 40 years of holding management roles in companies across several industries and multiple countries, I did not see a single company that focused any time or money on developing management capabilities among promotable staff or people newly promoted into management roles. Making the problem worse was that I did not see a single company that incorporated staff development and criteria for advancement into their performance review process. I did work at a few companies that would pay for technical skills development, but not for management skills development.
Developing myself to be what I hope was a reasonably effective manager was the result of two things:
(1) Making mistakes and not being too arrogant to admit they were mistakes and refusing to correct them or accept accountability.
(2) Self-initiated and self-paid management development programs, independent reading, and observation of both effective and ineffective managers around me.
However, that approach to management self-development didn’t really bring things together until very late in my career when I completed a behavioral assessment tool. I was fortunate enough to have someone coaching me who was able to guide me in understanding how the points raised in the behavioral assessment related to my management behaviors and the way I had interpreted the behaviors I saw in others. I had previously completed other psychometric behavioral assessments as conditions for being hire or promoted. However, none of the companies that required those assessments made any effort to provide understanding of how the results of the assessments affected their hiring or promotion decision or how the results indicated specific positives and potential negatives about my management effectiveness.
I’m curious to know what specific behavioral assessment tools you used that elucidated more than the psychometric behavioral assessments.
@Richard Archer: What you say about assessments brings to mind how performance plans, exit interviews, and annual projections are used by companies. They’re not.
When is the last time a new company initiative was followed up with an outcomes analysis? But that would require saving and at some point reviewing the plan or document to begin with! Now, where did we file that?
In the ‘80s I worked at a regional fast food chain.
In Operations, the highest role someone could come on board at was Assistant Manager. And they had to be in that role a minimum of six months before they could be promoted. Same for each step up.
Sometimes someone was hired on for an executive role. So they got their promotions in six months to the day. But they put their time in.
Additionally, doing your boss’s job was the norm. Hourly employees often wrote schedules, did inventory, and other things normally done by managers. Of course time was taken to train them. But it freed up managers to do parts of their boss’s job.
Additionally, anyone not in Operations was required to work in a restaurant one week a year. The owner believed everyone had to understand and respect how revenue was generated to do their job well. Not just the owner and his wife working shift. Accounting. HR. Warehouse. Everyone.
Time spent slinging taco deeply impacted my professionalism. Even though I never pursued a management career.
I was fortunate to work for a company that did management training and had an awesome professional instructor. Over the years we had a couple days dedicated to learning how to effectively manage and for a while had a new manager employee group. The time and energy the company invested made me actually love people management and employee development.
To me, my measure of success was how good my team was, and if they sucked, it was on me to put them on the right path. Very very hard work but I’m most proud of the team I left behind at that job.
One of my colleagues told me that I had inspired him to be a better manager. I’ll remember that.
@Kat: Well said. What I’m proudest of on this website is the standard of conduct and the quality of comments posted by participants — who offer much better advice and commentary than I do. You all are the real value in this website and I love pointing that out to anyone that asks me what ATH is all about. A million thanks to you all! You teach me far more than I could ever teach you!
Not only was I promoted to management without any management training, but it was at the same salary as before. However, I did get new business cards, so there’s that.
It’s kind of natural that if you need a tech supervisor you pick your best tech guy, a sales manager pick your best salesman, etc. But the skills and desire don’t always match as you go up. In 2 companies I worked for you got sent to management training after you had held the position for a while. Not ideal but better than nothing. I have been told that companies used to have formal management development programs. That appears to have mostly gone away.
Taylor of Scientific Management fame thought that even first level supervision combined too many abilities and needed to be divided up.
This is also worth thinking about, and I learned it from engineers I worked with in Silicon Valley: Few companies have real career tracks for Individual Contributors who don’t want to move into management or who don’t belong in management. It was always easy to cherry-pick senior engineers who had reached the pinnacle title of Senior Engineer or Principal Engineer and had nowhere else to go on the technical career track. I could recruit them easily as long as my client had “more” in the way of an IC career track. In fact, after hearing why an excellent candidate was open to moving, my client would create “more” of an IC track just so they wouldn’t lose a great hire. This actually a good test of an employer’s organization: Where does the IC track end?
Yes, Nick! We’ve done employees, orgs, and our culture a grave disservice by pressuring and shaming ICs and SMEs who want to stay where they are — especially men. They’re happy, productive, and essential to an org’s success. Let’s go back to celebrating working class labor, and lifelong ICs. *These* are the essential workers!
A former employer, a petroleum consultancy, deliberately had two career ladders; one in direction management and one in technical direction. They recognized that not everyone wants to become a manager, and instead wanted to keep good technical people developing.
My favorite employee development story. An HR director gave a presentation on how she set her company up for the people they needed.
The company needed to fill 10 slots. 75% CNC Machinist 25% unrelated (think Librarian with a commercial drivers license).
The company conducted a six-month search over four states and could not even find anyone to interview. That was when she presented her plan:
Recruit 10 people with no machinist experience. But really focus on finding the right people. Bring them on as full-time internal employees. Pay entry-level machinist wages. Divide the day between machinists classes at the community college and OJT on-site.
At the end of two years they were CNC certified. Trained exactly how they needed to be (without having to unlearn bad habits). Paid competitive wages.
In the ten years following, 2 left. One moved across the country to tend a relative with a long-term illness. The other was just very talented and motivated and moved in to in to a very successful management career.
THIS. Brilliant example, Gregory! Back in the day, managers more often did what you describe here — hiring people for qualities like intelligence, energy, curiosity, resourcefulness, etc. Then they trained you on the specific skills needed for the job.
That’s how my dad got a job writing code for NASA with a grad degree in math from CalTech. That’s how I got jobs as a bilingual social worker, graduate school program director, business consultant, and learning & development professional between 1992 and 2004. With degrees in sociology and communication.
Now, I can’t get an interview for a trad job to save my life despite superior qualifications and skills. Why? Because employers favor candidates who have the same job title as the open position, and at similar orgs. If you don’t have the same job at a similar org, you can’t get in the door (also because AI). This is also a reason so many jobs and orgs have become narrow and overspecialized to the point of losing perspective, creativity, and agility.
To be fair, not everything was peachy “back in the day”– I am a woman after all lol — but the practice of hiring sufficiently capable folks with good character, who were willing and able to learn, served us better overall.
@Susana: It’s one of the most embarrassing conundrums in HR: “We want out of the box thinkers with great potential who will bring new ideas.”
So HR interviews only people that have been doing the job advertised for 5 years and who will accept the same pay or less to keep doing it.
What are we missing? Why would a talented, successful person change employers just to keep doing the same job? Ask HR.
Former middle manager here. I have been at the same small oil company for 11 years. After the first 7 years as an exploration geologist (and 5 more years in other organizations before that), the CEO asked me to take the role as Exploration Manager. Because I was good at exploration, had the courage to voice my opinions and had a good relationship with him.
After 3.5 years in that role, I can’t do any LinkedIn bragging about being successful. There were two reasons for the lack of success:
Firstly, while I am good at petroleum exploration, I am not a good manager. The nitty-gritty administration, juggling all the boring, necessary things hiding behind airport books about Leadership; it just does not fit my personality. I kind of knew that, took it as a challenge, worked on it and got some training, but the ratio of admin-to-exploration was much worse than expected. After leaving the position, I have promised my former “subordinates” to never become their manager again.
Secondly, and worse, I was a king without land. At the time as I took the position, the company changed direction. The owners and the board wanted to be “agile” and “opportunistic”, which in practice meant “whichever shiny things the owners and the board got a crush on”, with no clear strategy framework to work within. Every time I developed a strategy or suggested a project, the higher powers changed direction, or just did not care.
On top of that, the management group, where I sat, had different opinions on the company strategy. Some projects initiated by another manager were wasted, because they demanded more time and money than we had, and because he wanted to do things contrary to how other companies in the industry do, thus making it difficult to find partners.
The CEO, while a nice guy, did not have the toughness to cut through this Gordic knot – and if he had done, he would probably be fired, because the real CEOs of the company were the board chairman and the CFO of the majority owner.
Finally, the board formalized what was obviously true, there would be no exploration, and I recently went back to a chief technical position. But the lesson learned, to post as a humblebrag on LinkedIn, is that there must be alignment both on how a person fits a role and how that role fits the organization and the strategy.
@Karsten: There’s a whole other discussion you’re hinting at that I won’t get into here but I’ll summarize it as a bit of advice to think about. Responsibility and authority are two very different things. Often, you can’t really accept the former unless you are also granted the latter. Failing to understand that when accepting a management job can doom you before you even start and will for certain crush you in short order.
Exactly! In fact, the former CEO of the company retired partly because he was given responsibility for a field development, but the back seat drivers above did not give him the authority.
Wow, what a great article and discussion!
I know the focus of the article and subsequent discussion is the problem of putting people in management positions without training them for the actual job of managing, and there are plenty of memories (myself included) of a time when companies and agencies did actually did train their own managers. But this is a pattern–companies don’t train new hires or even not new hires (e.g., you go from your entry level job to a higher level job, non-management) either. Today, companies expect employees to be profitable the moment their butts hit the chairs without any training (and if the jobs require a college degree, then employers complain that these graduates are worthless because they can’t do the jobs without training and expect colleges to provide such job-specific training for them).
Not training new managers (and even new employees) isn’t limited to the private sector. One of my jobs was working for the state, and when I began, I had a couple of hours with the guy I was replacing. There was no manual, no instructions, nothing. My boss didn’t know. The other faculty didn’t have a clue. I remember calling other departments to learn what I needed to submit to them, the deadlines, and more. One department very kindly sent over two people to sit down with me, so I’d know what I needed to do in my dealings with them. Later, there was one faculty member who knew a lot (he’d been dept. chair for a long time), and he’d help me when things got hairy. But otherwise, I was on my own. I made sure I knew the necessary for the two other departments that I dealt with, the paperwork I needed to submit, and most importantly, WHO to call if there was a problem.
It is too bad that training provided. When I worked in the private sector, the most common answer re why they don’t provide any training any more was cost, yet no one ever calculated the costs of NOT training.
Marybeth: Indeed, companies do not track the costs of NOT training! My favorite alternative is along the lines of what you’ve done: learn from other employees and managers. Esp in management jobs I’ve had, I made a point of visiting other departments, asking how they operated, volunteering (e.g., to work in shipping for a day), and asking those managers, “How do I and my dept affect YOUR dept?” That always bought me added credibility and more conversations – and lots of knowledge I could use!
You figured it out!