What’s Wrong with Management Training?

I will often start my management training programs by asking people to leave. Sometimes they think I’m kidding. But I take them through a quick and fun little exercise to determine whether they have more important things to do that will keep them from focusing on and participating fully and genuinely in the program. If they do, I invite them to leave with no harm done and no foul committed. For those who choose to stay, I invite them to let go of their to do list and commit fully to the program since, if they are distracted, they will neither learn not make progress on their to do list and that’s a lose – lose – lose for all of us: them, the participants, me, your company and your employees.

Great Management is Not Created the Same

What’s wrong with management training is that we treat it like a discrete body of knowledge that can be transferred in a day or two or seven; something we can learn and be deemed to know after having completed even a four year degree on the topic. This is not the case. There are three types of managers:

• The New Manager – An enthusiastic, not-yet-competent-in-the-field professional eager to soak up like a sponge whatever they can get their hands on in order to do a decent job.
• The Seasoned Manager – A self-confident liability to the company who feels they’ve been there, learned that and have way more important business issues of concern than further exploring management practices.
• The Wise Manager – A self-aware contributor who knows that one could spend seven hundred lifetimes as a manager and still not encounter all the crazy issues human beings can present in the workplace.

Mistakes in Management Training

What’s wrong with Management Training is that we typically develop and deliver it for the first two types of managers and we fail to set the expectation for or hold managers accountable to becoming the third type. This is a mistake. When we present management training programs without explicitly setting expectations for what management (and leadership) entails and how specifically – and consequentially – people will be held accountable for those responsibilities, any training we do ends up being like speaking about the dress code: no one thinks you’re talking about them. The grown woman in the middle row wearing a crop top, pajama bottoms and a pair of rubber slides is looking around at all her colleagues nodding in solidarity with the HR person who is desperately trying to define business causal.

Individual, Situational and Accidental

Managers are individuals – each one uniquely unique. Some will be more drill sergeant-y, others more therapist-y and both – and all the types in between – can be successful. Management is situational – some contexts calling for tough love, others calling for TLC. Management is a practice that requires skill, knowledge, flexibility, continued education, discipline and humility. Strong managers are developed over time with practice and, in most cases, by accident.

What Do you Expect?

If your business outcomes are important to your leadership and those business outcomes require efficient and effective workforce performance, then setting clear and consequential expectations for the performance of your managers can go much further than hiring a trainer to talk at people while they answer their emails and blow sandwich crumbs out of their laptop keyboards.

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