This
is part 2 of 2 of the article I posted on October 14, 2012
Actions
to take
Doing the bare minimum of training and development—just
enough to keep your organization within the law, and to keep from being
sued—can easily lead to behaviors that damage companies’ reputations. Once
damaged, a reputation takes significant time and money to restore. Some
companies never really recover. Before find yourself in a position of losing
top talent or dealing with a weakened organizational reputation, you can invest
in processes to improve the management capability in your organization.
Human resource leaders are in an ideal position to
influence all the elements needed to change the role of managers and to help
their organizations build management capability. Many elements are needed, of
course, but the first is the sponsorship of the most senior leaders to ensure
buy-in and demonstrable support for the process. The rest of the elements
involve your organization’s beliefs, values and culture. All of these are
levers for change and are necessary to reinforce norms and expectations.
Building management capability goes beyond training.
It includes transforming the organization’s culture so that it values the role
that management plays in attracting and retaining top talent and setting forth
clear expectations for the manager’s role. As this model indicates, all
organizations have an underlying set of beliefs about the importance of the
manager. Organizations that have strong management capabilities believe that
managers are critical for their ability to attract, retain and motivate employees.
Strong beliefs influence the values of an organization, and consequently,
culture.
Each of the levers of change in the model represents
an area that organizations must consider if they want to build strong
management capability. Just focusing on one lever of change will not bring
about lasting change in management capability; the current culture will
overwhelm small changes. By focusing on numerous change levers, organizations
can modify the culture and create long-term change. Briefly, the levers
represent the following considerations:
·
Leadership: An organization’s leadership
must both believe in the value of the role that managers play and must lead by
example.
·
Communication: The leadership team must
consistently communicate the importance of the role of the manager to the
organization and its ability to achieve high performance, attract talent and
retain it.
·
Competencies: Management competencies
must be assessed and developed. Entry into a management role must be predicated
on an appropriate, although not necessarily perfect, set of skills.
·
Measurement and rewards: Any effective
strategy must be integrated into the scorecard. It must be measured and
rewarded.
·
Structure and symbols: The role of a
manager must be structured so that the manager can spend sufficient time with
direct reports. The term "manager" must mean something in terms of
role expectations.
By focusing on these levers of change, the
organization will develop new norms and expectations for behavior. The
organizational beliefs regarding the management role will actually conform to
what the levers of change are encouraging: a belief that managers’ roles do
make a difference.
Leadership
first: showing the way
Levers for change begin with leadership. Leadership sets
the tone and shows the way. How your leaders think will cast the mold for the
rest of the organization.
It must be clear to others that your organization’s
leaders believe that management capability is an asset worth time and
resources. Where leaders demonstrate this through their own behaviors, the
organizations will have corresponding success. Having leaders publicly
recognize individuals for outstanding team management (as opposed to personally
exceeding business goals) will set the tone for the importance the organization
places on the role of the manager in delivering results.
When leaders spend time with their direct reports,
setting clear goals and expectations, providing feedback and actively working
to build bench strength in the organization, they are setting expectations for
how others will act. Take Jack Welch during his GE days. He spent a great deal
of his personal time both developing his own successor
(I’ve preached for years that you
should always be training your replacement) and developing leadership
capability throughout the organization by participating the GE’s management
development programs. As a consequence, GE is constantly cited as having one of
the best leadership development programs in the world. This happened because
the senior leadership believed in the value of its leaders and made investments
to insure they could deliver their maximum capability.
Also, leaders are the ones who primarily create an
organization’s fundamental beliefs, values and culture. Where leaders go astray,
organizations often follow. Creating a powerful culture takes time. But leaders
can play a powerful role in establishing the outward signs of culture and
behaviors that they both embody and endorse.
Communication:
keeping everyone on the same page
Organizations tend to undervalue communication.
But communication plays a powerful role as the vehicle through which leaders
demonstrate and publicly recognize the desired behaviors in the organization.
How leaders talk about managers sets a clear message for what is expected in
the organization. Strong communication systems can help organizations build
strong cultures and enhance performance.
Competencies:
The essential building blocks
Identifying the critical competencies that make managers
successful in your organization is the first step in creating the new manager
role. New managers who are hired and current employees who are promoted into
management roles must be selected because they have the capability to deliver
on key functions of this role. These competencies include such skills as
setting goals that fit the business strategy, providing coaching and feedback
to others and helping employees understand how they fit into the big picture.
Often promotions are given because someone is a good
individual contributor. Good technical skills are a far cry from good
management skills. We need alternative career structures if the only way to
move up in the organization is to become a manager. Not all great individual
contributors make great managers. By having management competencies defined
within an organization we can also coach and develop individuals on how to
improve in these specific areas.
Measuring,
rewarding and reinforcing
It’s a cliché, but it’s true: That which gets measured and rewarded
gets done. If you don’t include management competencies and results for such
areas as reduction in turnover or developing staff to improve organizational
bench strength in performance appraisal systems, managers will not focus on
these issues. Organizations that reward their managers for being good managers
will stand the greatest chance of building strong management capability over
time. Rewards do not need to take the form of money. In fact, simple public
recognition of strong management skills sends a message to the rest of the
organization: Managers are important to us.
Organization
structure: the key symbol
When organizations design jobs so that managers must
spend 90 percent of their time doing non-management work, we send a very clear
message about how we view the management aspects of a manager’s role: They are
not important. We need to redesign organizational structures to support
managers so they can truly manage the talent within the organization.
By involving your leaders, crafting key messages,
developing managers and examining the current messages managers receive about
their role in managing others, HR leaders can change how managers are viewed,
and how they view themselves.
The process of building better managers is not fast
or cheap. But the rewards can be substantial and well worth the effort.
Regards,
George F. Mancuso
George F. Mancuso,
CPC
