I was lucky to be a young manager at a time when it was typical to be directed, trained, mentored, and generally developed by your senior managers. Back then, there were enough senior managers around that all the junior managers got personal attention — whether they liked it or not.
My senior managers actually explained things to me. I didn’t always agree with everything they taught me or with all the particulars of their behavior, but the content was always relevant to the special nature of the business, and their attention gave me the opportunity to learn from both positive and negative examples.
But by the mid-’80s, businesses were cutting the guts out of middle management. Each successive cycle of rightsizing, layoffs, and buyouts set up scenarios in which senior execs had too many direct reports — and too many of those reports were the equivalent of raw recruits who were good material, perhaps, but definitely unseasoned.
The Disappearing Apprentice
When junior management was a form of apprenticeship, new up-and-comings learned not only their functional responsibilities, but also what was expected of managers. I’ve always suspected that the loss of this apprenticeship — and the extended, often informal training and development process that it offered — is one of the underlying reasons for ongoing management churn as well as the trend of young execs’ to move up by moving to another company.
Once there was no longer a clear path of internal advancement for junior managers in a given company, organizations were faced with a growing proportion of rising managers who had never been groomed for senior success. Many of these managerial aspirants did not fit as well or accomplish as much for their companies as their predecessors had, so they tended to have flatter career trajectories — making it more likely that they’d be subject to the next round of cuts and that they’d have to look elsewhere for growth.
But the situation is also partially a structural problem. It’s hard to train managers in both fundamentals and context when their senior leaders have no bandwidth, no time, and are themselves jumping from one apparent crisis to another.
And it’s not only the junior managers who have suffered from this lack of structure. Over time, increasing numbers of senior managers have never received particularly developmental training either.
Much floundering and poor decision-making ensued — and unfortunately it has continued to this day. It’s hard to tell, looking back, if management is really significantly less effective or if we just have more explicit models for evaluating managers and reasons for finding them wanting. Even when companies recognize that the necessary development is missing, the likelihood of their resurrecting the old apprenticeship system is low: it’s too expensive and too time consuming.
From Manager to Coach?
So as is true of many functions that benefit from specific expertise but are not perceived as being crucial on a daily basis, many businesses are outsourcing their professional development to corporate coaches. In fact, some large corporations outsource virtually the entirety of their managerial development to coaching companies that are assigned to coach all members of management at certain levels.
If you’re outsourcing what should be a core competency of leadership, the process of vendor management is absolutely essential. Reviewing whether the participants are growing, developing and serving the business is indispensible. Next week’s blog will examine an alternative approach.
Onward and upward,
LK
