quantmleap

Over the past few months I’ve been conducting an unofficial survey amongst professional colleagues and friends where I sought to obtain their response to the following question: “In your professional history, in those instances where you have been reporting to another manager, can you recall whether or not your manager has taken concrete, planned, actions aimed at progressing your professional career?” In other words, what I set up to investigate was whether or not people on my professional network have had positive experience with their managers, where their managers have taken it upon themselves to assist them in becoming better professionals. If I wanted to be even more blunt I would phrase the question as follows: “has any of your past managers actually did their job and met their professional obligations towards you?“.

You’d better pause here for a moment and think about this question for a moment. What was your experience like?

I’m certain you will not be surprised to hear that in the majority of the cases (probably over 90% of those asked) the answer was a resounding ‘NO‘, suggesting that the very people to whom they were reporting did not take the responsibility for their direct reports’ professional growth.

The reason I was not surprise is because my professional experience of almost 30 years has been exactly the same. I can say quite categorically that I have never met a manager that has demonstrated the basic interest in the growth of his employees. Sure, they were all concerned about the timeliness and quality of their direct report’s deliverables but assumed that the responsibility for ensuring their long term capability growth lies with somebody else, and not with them.

You might think that the situation would be different in project environments. After all the PMI strongly advocates a project management process which attends to the development of project team members. The PMBoK, in the Human Resource Management Knowledge Area discusses (in section 9.3 – Develop Project Team) the need to improve the competencies of team members in order to improve the overall performance of the project team. The guide identifies a number of tools and techniques aimed at achieving  this goal, and mentions, amongst others, the need to apply coaching and provide training, but no meaningful or detailed information is provided as to how this could be done in a project environment, where delivery pressures are always present. Irrespective of the above though, given the usual constraints imposed on projects where cost, time and quality issues seem to take precedence over all other issues, project managers are unlikely to rate the long term professional well being of their team members above the immediate project pressures, and as such the chances of project managers taking active interest in the long term professional development of their teams are low at best.

So we are back to square one.

There is clearly a need for a revolutionary change of attitude at all management levels. The Theory of Constraints teaches us that an organizational process is only as robust as it’s weakest component. The discussion above suggests that as far as staff development is concerned the chain as a whole is weak. Fixing this massive management deficiency requires slow but continuous improvement, where individual components are strengthened independently with the expectation that total chain improvement will only be achieved in the long run, once all parts have been similarly improved. Sounds abstract? Let me elaborate. If you, yes I’m referring to YOU, take up the commitment to improve your staff management attitude and commence taking planned, concrete measures to increase their long term efficiency and performance, that will be like fixing one component of your organizational weak chain. Most likely, when your direct reports become managers in their own right, they will implement the techniques they’ve learned from you (yes YOU) and a new generation of effective managers will emerge. That’s few more links in the chain. Imagine other managers making a similar commitment and voila, we’ve got a revolution underway.

The above discussion brings to mind the following story (based, as far as I understand on “The Star Thrower” by Loren Eiseley, 1907 – 1977):

Once a man was walking along a beach. The sun was shining and it was a beautiful day. Off in the distance he could see a person going back and forth between the surf’s edge and and the beach. Back and forth this person went. As the man approached he could see that there were hundreds of starfish stranded on the sand as the result of the natural action of the tide.

The man was stuck by the apparent futility of the task. There were far too many starfish. Many of them were sure to perish. As he approached the person continued the task of picking up starfish one by one and throwing them into the surf.

As he came up to the person he said, “You must be crazy. There are thousands of miles of beach covered with starfish. You can’t possibly make a difference.” The person looked at the man. He then stooped down and pick up one more starfish and threw it back into the ocean. He turned back to the man and said, “It sure made a difference to that one!”

It is up to you and no excuse in the world can change this reality. What would you do about it?

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Until next time.

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