Management in Crisis

After a few years of classes, they expect to manage people who have many times the amount of knowledge, gained through intensive personal experience. Those without the credentials have been relegated to the “slow track” and subjected to the ‘leadership’ of those who do not have the legitimacy to lead!

What has gone wrong with the system – a system that ensures that the wrong people will get educated in the wrong way with the wrong consequences? How much evidence needs to be brought to the table to prove that management is not a science – that leadership cannot be taught? How many more Enrons, Parlamats, Worldcoms, and the like, need to hit the headlines before we wake up?

Our education system professes to develop managers, but instead produce analysts ready to apply one-size-fits-all techniques no matter the context. The current programmes pretend to create managers out of people with no experience or expressed leadership skills. Leadership is a natural quality and trying to teach it to someone who has never managed is like trying to teach psychology to someone who has never met another human being!

More art than science, when management is mixed with craft or experience, it becomes a practice. Perhaps that is why some enlightened business owners appoint schoolteachers in managerial positions – they at least know how to manage! Inexperienced students cannot appreciate the practice of management, so they focus on the science, or analysis, that is the basis for most of our graduate educational programmes. Management is treated like a profession that can be learned without experience and then applied in every situation. Management is, in fact, a facilitating activity, a soft art, which embodies deep understanding of the human psyche.

Unfortunately, it is skewed values that have caused the management crisis in which we find ourselves today. Corporations are so focussed on shareholder returns that they purposely employ an age group seeking independence from family and roots – an age group in the process of rebellion against responsibility yet are employed to take responsibility. These unfortunate souls are lured by the promise of worldly riches, are exploited to the hilt, and then tossed aside once their usefulness has been exhausted. This is not just – this is madness! What of the management continuum? Where is the next generation of managers and leaders to come from? Who will pass on their hard-earned experience to the heirs of the next generation?

Take heart though, the wheel always turns! More and more businesses today are waking up to the follies of the recent past and are, once again, in the process of identifying raw, young, talent within their own ranks. They are nurturing this talent, inculcating it with the values they wish to instil into their corporate culture, and developing it into the managers and leaders who will take the businesses into the next generation. Gone are the days when, because you have an MBA, you will walk into the top job!

So, to those of you who have the ambition, initiative, imagination, and vision, take careful note of the differences between leaders and managers … decide where you want to be and start working toward your objective:

Leaders

Do the right thing.

Focus on effectiveness.

Serve customers.

Make employees responsible.

Work for the people.

Create thinkers / problem solvers.

Focus on growing people and on developing their strengths.

Guide employees within the chief aim of the organisation.

Managers

Do things right.

Focus on efficiency.

Defend policies.

Are responsive to employees.

Work for the bottom line / statistics.

Create followers.

Focus on what people are doing wrong and correct them.

Oversee implementation of daily tasks.

 

Simply because you lack the formal, graduate, grounding does not mean that you do not have a role to play. You can acquire the necessary skills sets to rise to the top, and there are those who possess the experience who are there to help you.

To you, the employer, teach your children well because your future is in their hands! It is far cheaper to grow your own leadership than it is to hire raw recruits versed in theory. Identify, and develop, your human capital!

 

QUOTATION:

In the greater scheme of things, what matters is not how long you live, but why you live, what you stand for, and are willing to die for.

Paul Watson, Captain, The Sea Shepherd Society

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