“I spent most of my 40-year career as a technician and the last 17 years in supervision and management,” he said. “I was promoted to management because of my skills as a good technician and [my] work ethic. I got a management job as a reward, not because I was ready to manage. In other words, I was promoted for the wrong reasons.”
The writer continued with the clarity and gravitas of someone who’s learned important lessons the hard way.
“Today I work hard to mentor my staff…Companies don’t train managers to manage. They don’t teach them how to develop people, evaluate talent, or help employees grow. They just hand out titles.”
I sat up in my fancy office chair. This stranger was speaking truths I, too, had learned the hard way.
“…It’s really tough being a manager today. I’ve taken Organizational Behavior courses to fill the gaps myself. I promote people only when they’re ready to manage — not because they’re good technicians.”
I sunk back into my chair, struck by the tragedy and triumph of the writer’s story. He’d hit the nail on the frickin’ head. Several times.
For context, I’m a veteran organizational trainer and consultant who’s spent 25 years developing leaders in multiple industries across the U.S. and six other countries. I’m also a professor at a major state university business school who teaches organizational behavior and HR management. And I was once a “high potential” individual contributor who was prematurely promoted to management in a dysfunctional organization, with little support.
As an itinerant consultant, I actively participated in organizations’ growing preference for outsourcing essential functions (like talent and leadership development) instead of doing them in-house. One of the results is an increase in leader incompetence and organizational corruption as the writer pointed out. What devastates me is that many of my 20-year-old undergrads assume this is just “how the world works” because that’s all they’ve experienced.
But the problem isn’t just that we dole out promotions as rewards for jobs well done. It’s also that we attach status, power, and higher pay to those positions. In an era where working- and middle-class folks make far less than we did in the 1970s [1] and income inequality has increased into the danger zone, “lower level” employees are increasingly incentivized to pursue these jobs by any means necessary. This favors people with “dark triad” sociopathic traits, which is why sociopaths are overrepresented the higher you go in any organization.
Also, major research conducted by Korn Ferry, one of my former employers, shows that the biggest point of failure for employees moving “up the ladder” is precisely when they move into middle management. Why? Because the skills needed to succeed at higher levels of leadership (social, strategic) are totally different from the skills needed to succeed as individual contributors or frontline supervisors (technical).
Essentially, we reward people for being excellent at a job by giving them a totally different job — for which they might not even be suited! When these managers fail, it’s costly to the bottom line, morale, productivity, efficiency — all the metrics that matter. And yet most organizations still view these failures as individual deficiencies instead of an indictment of a dumb (and expensive) system. Then they waste more money hiring expensive coaches to fix the problem they caused.
So, the problem isn’t just the lack of developing high-potential employees or new managers. The problem is also the lack of properly identifying who is best suited for those roles.
For instance, I learned the hard way that I am not a good frontline supervisor. The required skills aren’t in my “zone of genius”, nor am I particularly interested in learning them. However, I’m a brilliant manager of managers, which I also enjoy. But, since we’ve set up a false hierarchy where one doesn’t get to the “manager of managers” level without first moving up from a supervisor role, many potentially skilled leaders never find their sweet spot, and organizations miss out on their skills. Our system is akin to requiring employees to pass algebra before being allowed to take calculus. But unlike in math, the knowledge isn’t transferable. It’s a different skillset.
The way out?
Create flatter, more humane pay scales to de-incentivize leadership roles being used as rewards. Shift to the mindset earlier humans had about leadership. Specifically, fill leadership positions by matching competence with required skills (or randomly, check out “sortition”). And decouple leadership from power. This includes shortening or eliminating “the ladder” and assigning leadership based on demonstrated skills. Or, on aptitude or qualities like intelligence, resourcefulness, and empathy, then teaching necessary skills.
The notion that having more people “under you” should grant you more money and power is an empire-and slavery-mentality, and not universal in human history. In fact, thinking this way is so ingrained in modern humans, many readers probably think my last few sentences are bonkers. But that’s the reaction earlier humans had to our way of life, and we’ve got ample evidence ours is far more bonkers, harmful, and unsustainable.
We can do things differently—our ancestors already did. This current system is just one reality we invented. Let’s (re)imagine a new one, before incompetence, inequity, and sociopathy destroy our collective flourishing at work and beyond.
[1] The Drucker ratio of 1:20 — average worker pay to CEO pay — was the norm until then, and critical for a stable society. Now it’s 1:300+.
