How to develop great managers

ID-10069792As I read “Why Good Managers Are So Rare,” I thought, “This has to be written by someone from Gallup.” It’s presenting the same outdated view of talent management that Gallup has been espousing for quite awhile now. While it’s true that there are currently relatively few good managers and that there’s a strong link between management abilities, employee engagement, and organizational success, it’s not true that you can or even should hire yourself into better management. There simply isn’t enough turnover in the management ranks. In addition, management talent (which this post argues is essentially genetic) isn’t abundant enough to meet all of the requirements for effective managers. The post also neglects to mention that one of the underlying causes of poor management is the pervasive lack of effective management development programs. People get promoted and are expected to somehow develop into great managers by watching PowerPoint slides, which is absurd. Fortunately, recent breakthroughs in the study of “positive deviance”—what top performers really think and do—and the neuroscience of learning have led to successful leadership development programs. These are NOT “management” development programs. Rather, our leadership development programs guide 90%+ of potential leaders to think and act like the best in about four to five months. More specifically, studies of top performing “managers” show that they’re always driven by a compelling purpose—a desire to achieve a greater social good. This drive causes them to work very hard to master their functions. When the stars’ images of purpose and mastery are articulated in a particular way and presented to others following the guidelines of neuroscience, virtually any manager becomes a transformational leader. These learning processes are so deeply grounded in science that the results are very consistent, predictable, and remarkably inexpensive to achieve. Using these approaches, leaders quickly live the attitudes and behaviors of great leaders and, not surprisingly, employee engagement and productivity soar. All this is achieved without having to hire anyone new. Isn’t developing your own talent pool a better way to create high-performing leadership and teams? Read the full article at Harvard Business Review. Image courtesy of samarttiw / FreeDigitalPhotos.net]]>

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