Why won’t we invest in our managers?

This is not a fun time to be a corporate manager. Even if you aren’t worried about losing your own job, you’re probably concerned about laying people off who work for you.

You start thinking to yourself, “No one ever trained me for this. What do I say? How do I act when I have to break the news to them? Can I answer their questions? How will they react? What happens if someone ‘loses it’ during our conversation?”

Too often, a manager’s own leadership development skills are based on the behaviors of people they worked for at one time in their careers. While it may not be totally analogous to the child who grows up in a dysfunctional family and then mimics their parent’s behavior as an adult, I think you get the picture.

If this is the way some managers learn to lead, how do we fix it?

In professional sports, athletes spend thousands of hours at their craft away from the playing field. They become better at what they do through arduous training sessions, lots of repetition, studying, and just plain hard work. For every game a professional athlete plays, they practice and train 10 times longer. If we want our corporate managers to be the best at what they do, shouldn’t we be taking a page from professional athletes and invest in our managers through proper training and teaching?

Of course the answer is yes, but the reality is that when corporate budgets are cut, what is one of the first items to get the ax? You’ve got it—management and leadership training. When you take a step back and think about it rationally, the most critical time to invest in your management team is when the business is not going well. That’s the time you need your professionals to lead, manage, and be engaged with other employees. This is when you discover who the real leaders are in an organization.

We go to college and train people to become engineers, teachers, analysts, accountants and scores of other professions. We train people to be firefighters, policemen, mechanics, plumbers and other critical skilled professionals. But we forget that once we become professionals, corporations don’t spend a lot of time training us on how to manage and lead others.

We need to re-think the way we look at managers. No more jokes about the Peter Principle. No more assumptions that just because an employee did a great job in a previous position, that same person will make a great manager.

Corporate America is filled with managers who use their time inefficiently, put themselves before the people they manage, and make decisions that are solely based either on emotion or are so analytical, they fail to consider human emotions at all.

I recently read that corporations spend about $1,000 per employee each year on training management/leadership training. If that is the case, it is no wonder we are having trouble developing leaders. We are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to reinvest in our infrastructure. Isn’t it time to start reinvesting in our future leaders of Corporate America?