If you had to get a tattoo right now – I mean, if you really had to, gun-to-your-head and all that – what would you go for?
You could go traditional: a rose, a dolphin, a heart with “mum” in it. You could go a bit Glastonbury: Celtic band, geometric design, something from South America. You could embrace the clever-clever, teenage irony of a tattoo that just says “Your Name”.
Here’s an embarrassing confession: if it was me with the gun to my temple, I’d be tempted to get this:
Every Business is a Management School and the CEO is the Principal
No doubt about it, this would make one big (and super-weird) tattoo… and I’d get it inked on my arm because I see this fact ignored, glossed over, swept under the carpet, or just plain misunderstood by high growth businesses up and down the country all the time.
And if CEOs and senior managers don’t get this principle, huge chunks of training budget are wasted, people’s patience and goodwill is eroded, and ultimately their companies’ growth is stunted.
Every minute of every day every business is ALREADY running a management training, talent management, leadership development project.
Every second of every day, people in your company are looking at the behaviour of the people above them and drawing the conclusion: this is what it takes to be successful in this business.
They see this behaviour every day for the months or years they spend working for your company. They live with the decisions this culture creates. They sit through the meetings this culture generates. They see who is promoted and who isn’t, what behaviour is rewarded and what isn’t.
Imagine you want to change your people’s behaviour. You want better management, stronger leadership, a more effective culture. Who do you start with?
It’s a no-brainer: it’s got to be the CEO or the most senior team. They’re there long before any training initiative starts, and they’ll be there long after it’s over. And their actions are creating the culture. People will either:
• do what their managers do
• do what they think their managers are doing, based on what they can see and understand of their managers’ actions
• do what they think their managers want them to do
• do what their managers reward
• do what their managers let them get away with
Any training project must fit into the lessons of the wider management / leadership / talent development programme your business is running all day every day. And if the message from the management training project looks different from the message people are getting every day from their boss and the senior team, people are faced with a tough decision:
• decide their boss doesn’t manage as effectively as she could and adopt the practices they discovered on the course, leading to disaffection with their boss in the months to come
• or copy their boss and ignore what they’re doing in the seminar room – destroying any chance the programme has of doing what the sponsor wanted it to: improving people’s behaviour and developing new skills
Either way, your development project is unlikely to yield the results you want…
This post originally appeared at www.mitchellphoenix.com on 22 May, 2013
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