Here’s a common situation: your business is in high growth, people’s responsibilities are expanding rapidly, and your managers will need to be able to do more tomorrow than they can today.
You identify a group of high fliers in your company. They are the leaders of the future. The quicker you can develop them, the more they can take on and the more smoothly you can grow. So you send them on a management course.
Last time we put forward the principle that every business is already running a leadership development / management training / talent management project – simply by virtue of the example the senior people set every day (you can read more about that here). With this in mind, here are two possible scenarios that will affect how easily your (more localised) management development project will slot into the wider context:
The first is where the senior people in your business, including the CEO, have already done a senior version of this management training programme, and their aim is to give the high potential group the same management tool kit that the top team are already using. This will help spread a strong, consistent way of working throughout the business. The senior group will be able to guide the next tier through the programme, and help them use it to create results day to day.
The second scenario is where the senior people have not done any version of the course they are about to prescribe for the up-and-coming managers. Many of the things that the high potential group are doing (and often the things they’re doing that the senior people don’t like) have been copied from, or inspired by, the senior team’s behaviour. And the senior team don’t realise this.
If the high-fliers work out that they’re in the second scenario, the logical question to ask themselves is: why haven’t the top people done this course?
Approach the senior team in office hours and ask them why they don’t want to attend their version of this programme, and they’ll mention their long years of experience, the MBAs they hold, or the altruistic thinking that they’ve had budget spent on their development in the past, while the more junior people have not.
Wake any of the senior people up in the middle of the night and ask them why they don’t want to attend this course, and they’ll tell you that deep down they suspect it isn’t particularly useful, so why would they want to waste their time on it?
And so the decapitated organization is born. Senior people disappear off one by one for sessions with their coach / therapist, and end up doing different things depending on what their coach said, what they’ve done for the last 20 years, what they read in an airport paperback last month…
High potential people get what they can from the course they’ve been prescribed, conscious all the while that the senior people didn’t bother with it, and more and more aware that what the senior people do sometimes contradicts what their course says they should do.
The result of all this is hugely damaging. Don’t forget – every business is a management school and the CEO is the Principal. Everything about how this process was handled is itself a lesson in the wider management training project you’re running all day every day…
… and the most powerful lesson the high fliers will learn from the project described above is that the principle “do as I say and not as I do” is in operation in their organization. And in time, they’ll start acting in this way with their people.
Now you not only have a decapitated organization, with the senior people doing something different from everyone else, but you also have decapitated teams, with team leaders saying one thing and doing another.
The ultimate effect? This is a lesson that not everyone will want to hear. Some of your really ambitious, effective people will observe this is happening, and could easily draw the conclusion that they’d be better off working elsewhere…
This post originally appeared at www.mitchellphoenix.com in June, 2013