Taking Management Seriously.......

90% of the problems in organisations can be traced back to a failure of management - fact. So why do we fail to take management seriously?

The first thing to say is that it is not the individual managers fault it is the system (or lack of) for recruiting, developing and managing managers. Management is the only profession that you get promoted into because you are good at something else. The classic mistake is promoting the best salesperson to be a sales manager.....

Also, management is the only profession that it is thought no preparation is necessary. Yet the latest research clearly shows that high performance is any field requires considerable practice over a long period of time.

Managers are generally hired without any real assessment of their ability to manage. They receive little guidance about what is expected and have few real successful role models to imitate. They get little feedback on their performance and few opportunities to practice their skills with useful feedback.

However, no one within the organisation normally recognises that the standard of management, recruitment, development and performance is poor, therefore nothing usually gets done about it. Likewise, the managers in other organisations are no better so benchmarking is of little value. This is a conspiracy of silence.....

Meanwhile competitors, the government, taxes, banks, markets etc are blamed for the organisation's failure. We are looking in the wrong place! It's down to management.

What is to be done about it? In my view nothing less than a revolution in the way we select, train, motivate and manage managers will solve the problem.

Are we ready to take management seriously?