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Do we actually develop managers, or moreso just pretend to develop them?
I could probably write about nine million words on management development, but that would bore most people. Let’s not do it. It’s July 4th and I’ve been out with the dog and to a brewery so far, so we’ll keep this kind of tight.
The term ‘management development’ means the same general thing is ‘management training.’ It’s the idea of making managers better at their jobs. We already know from research that this doesn’t happen very much. Let’s connect two important dots here:
- Most people become managers around 30, and receive their first management development (training) around 42
- 82 percent of managers are ultimately considered the wrong hire
12 years is a long time. If you become a manager on a kid’s first day of kindergarten (he/she is 5), you won’t get trained on management development until that child is a junior in high school. See the problem here? We don’t prioritize management development — to most people, those topics are ‘soft skills’ — and as such, we have an 8 in 10 failure rate. A connects to B. It’s not really a correlation, IMHO. It’s causal. (Yes, I know that’s not officially correct.)
What’s gone wrong with management development? And can we improve it?
