Rachel
Burnham writes: One of the major challenges facing the UK
economy is the low level of productivity in the UK compared to other
economies. This is has been a long
standing and growing concern, so I won’t rehearse the data around this – but do
take a look at the reports and articles on my Productivity Puzzle Pinterest board if you want to find out more.
It is linked to many other important issues for the wider
economy, organisations and individuals such as levels of low pay in the UK, the
mix of businesses working in the UK (manufacturing, service, relationship with
growth, etc) and skills agenda topics such as the skills mix available in the
UK workforce. I find it interesting
that we don’t spend more time focusing on the contribution of L&D to
raising productivity within organisations.
One of the challenges is that often these topics are discussed in
different forums and with different groups of people – economists focusing on
productivity, ‘training providers & colleges’ on the skills agenda and so
on. It would be good to get more cross-over
in these discussions.
Back in February of this year, Sukh Pabial wrote about
productivity and the contribution that modern workplace learning could make to
that. I want to follow that up in this
post by focusing on the development of management skills.
One of the ways in which L&D can make a contribution
to improving productivity and therefore the overall effectiveness of
organisations is by focusing on the development of managers. Acas has identified 7 levers that contribute
within organisations to raising productivity and one of these key levers is ‘skilled
managers’. Acas have produced a helpful tool
to encourage organisations to reflect on where they are now in relation to each
of these levers and take action.
We know how damaging an ineffective manager can be to the
performance of the staff they manage and how the ripples of ineffectiveness can
spread through an organisation causing damage to engagement, trust,
communication flows and of course performance.
Yet many organisations still pay insufficient attention to developing
effective skills and behaviours amongst their managers.
I remember a group of students, on a CIPD course, discussing
the management development programmes within their organisations, some years
ago. One student described their
organisation as relying on ‘magic’ weekends for management development – I was
puzzled, I hadn’t come across this development tool before – use of
horse-whispering, juggling, orchestra’s for team development, but magic for
management development? Then she explained that when a manager was appointed
from within her organisation, they left on a Friday as an experienced and
competent team member and were expected to start back on a Monday morning as a
fully competent and effective manager – as though they had been sprinkled with
fairy dust over a ‘magic’ weekend!
I
have subsequently heard the CIPD’s Peter Cheese use the same phrase when
arguing that ‘we have not done enough to train and support line managers’
(A20:20 Vision Joint Acas/CIPD Manchester Conference 2016).
So we need to make sure that every manager has access to
the learning they need to develop the skills they need – whether it is as a
first time manager in their first few weeks, a long-term manager recognising
the need to improve and further develop their skills or a more senior manager
taking on new responsibilities and needing new perspectives. And we can’t rely on a one-shot development
programme to achieve that or even a series of development programmes at each at
key stages of a manager’s career. Managers, like other staff, will need support and access to relevant learning when they need it, at the point they are facing an issue, a difficulty or a new challenge.
Which brings me to the new report, ‘Inside the Heads of UK Managers’ published today by Good Practice.
This examines what it is that managers find the most challenging aspects
of their role. Perhaps unsurprisingly
dealing with organisational change was top of the list of the most challenging,
with managing conflicts and maintaining a work-life balance also high up
there. I found the break-down of the
information into sub-sets most fascinating – for example within the respondents
maintaining work-life balance was higher up the list for men than for women and
coaching/training my team higher for more senior managers than for lower
management.
The report encourages you to do your own research, to
identify what would be the biggest challenges for managers in your own
organisation and then compare this with your existing provision. It suggests
using the methodology they have developed to enable you to do this. This echoes a point made by Nick
Shackleton-Jones, at the recent CIPD L&D Show, when he talked about
identifying what bugs people and addressing these needs.
It is time for us, in L&D, to get real about
supporting managers to be effective in their work. I’m all for fairy dust, but let’s keep it
for bedtime stories and out of management development!
Rachel
Burnham
23/5/16
Burnham L & D Consultancy helps L&D
professionals become even more effective.
I am particularly interested in blended learning, the uses of social
media for learning, evaluation and anything that improves the impact of
learning on performance.
