What makes a great management team?
07.
Competence
Are those with management responsibilities well-qualified management practitioners? Are they skilled at working in the system just as well as on the system?
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Competence can be developed.
08.
Character
Do members of the management team serve the organisation and its people rather than themselves? Are they trustworthy role models? Do they love the truth and are willing to stand up for it?
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Character is a matter of selection.
09.
Cohesive team
Is the team committed to shared objectives and results? Do team members engage in constructive conflict? Do they trust each other and hold one another accountable? Are they a cohesive unit?
Cohesive teams can be developed.
Management development is often ineffective because it focuses on the wrong content and uses the wrong methods.
Huge investments with questionable results.
Companies spend tens of billions of dollars every year on management development. Through in-house programs, business schools and coaching. To what avail?
For the most part, these investments don’t lead to better organisational performance. And companies still struggle with the depth of their leadership bench.
Senior executives continue to say their organisations aren’t very effective in developing future leaders.
Wrong content.
Programs mostly focus on technical business knowledge and personal competencies. Both are valuable, but they are not management.
Management is a social technology. It is the technology of human accomplishment. Its core task is building and running organisations that work. Organisations that are fit for human beings and fit for our 21st century challenges.
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Analytical business skills (strategy, finance, marketing and so on), personal competencies (eg, giving feedback, communicating clearly), however useful, are not enough.
Wrong methods.
Management development tends to happen in the abstract - separated from the actual work managers are engaged with at any given moment in time.
It’s too much focused on analytical skills and is often content with disseminating knowledge. And this typically happens within specialist silos, ignoring the messy complexity of managerial practice.
Finally it ignores the systems perspective. It sees people as the problem, while 95% of performance is actually explained by the system within which these people operate.
Creating effective management development programs.
Holistic perspective.
Management, by definition, integrates many different perspectives. It’s how joint human accomplishment comes about. Management development must likewise integrate business functions, technology, leadership and human behaviour. The integrating function is management’s core task of building organisations as enablers of human performance.
Sound theory.
In many ways, management can be seen as profession. That means there’s a body of knowledge on which good practice relies. As a relatively young discipline, management’s body of knowledge is still developing. Nevertheless we have a lot of sound management theory in different areas such as innovation, strategy, systems thinking or human performance. Effective management development is based on such sound theory.
Embedded in practice.
Effective management development is connected to practice. In management, knowledge is useless when it is not applied to create results. Cases and exercises are fine to help understand a concept, but real learning and development only happens when theory is applied to real work.