It struck me over the past week that I may have been over-critical of mamagers in my writing last year. I have to realise that not everyone is like me!
However, a couple of stories I heard recently illustrate the point that managers need help too. Late in 2012, I met a man who had just been promoted to a manager’s job. He had been a driver for ten years, a promotion to manage a team of drivers had come up, he had applied for it and been successful. I asked him what the process had been once he had been given the job.
‘Well, I start as a manager next Monday’ he said. It transpired that he was doing his final shift as a driver on the Saturday, then taking over as manager on the Monday morning. He had not heard from his new boss, and only had ‘a rough idea’ who his new team was. He had not had any training, nor a conversation with anyone about how he was going to go about his new job.
Last week I met a 25-year old woman who had been promoted to a senior shift supervisor role three months ago. In this case, the woman had been working for the company for eight years, having joined straight from school. She had worked in a support role in the I.T. office for eight years. Towards the end of 2012, she had been called in to her boss’s office and told that she would be being made redundant, unless she took over a senior supervisor’s role on the shop floor. This employee decided to take on the shift supervisor’s role, as, in her words, she ‘didn’t want to be looking for a new job in the current climate’. Prior to taking on the role, she had little or no knowledge of what went on at shopfloor level, and she had only received training because she had requested it.
The first story is from a large international company, and the second from a relatively successful SME.
Do these stories demonstrate that management training, succession planning and just communicating properly with people have disappeared in 2013? Not so long ago I was working for a company where every support function had to demonstrate the value it added to the business on a regular basis, yet we had regular management development training and if anyone showed signs of wanting to progress their career within the business, it was part of my role as a Learning and Development Consultant to enable that.
Are these stories ‘one-off’s’ or are they part of a wider problem? Are we unwittingly creating weak links in the support chain? Will that result in a less engaged workforce, and less satisfied customers?
It’s had to have engaged employees when your management doesn’t know what they are supposed to be doing. Stepping up to a managerial level isn’t easy and you still need someone to guide you through the process. When you’re responsible for other people there isn’t a lot of time to “learn on the job.”
Thanks Trish! I know from personal experience that stepping up to managerial level is far from easy. I was lucky when I stepped up to manage a team, because I had had strong role models during my career and was able to take the best of their behaviour and use it to support my team. Nowadays I advocate succession planning within teams so people are developed before they step up to a role, and have supportive managers to help them achieve once they are in place.