I have been doing some work on the transition phase - people moving out of their primary vocational areas into management roles. From a variety of sources, I have I think identified some of the issues in the “transition phase” , and I'd appreciate comments and / or other thoughts
Transition concerns for "vocational emplyees" include:
The perception of their own managers and management
Not wishing to undertake unpopular tasks (like discipline)
A belief that management is not a “real job” like their primary vocational competence
The uncertainty as to what a management role actually is.
The insecurity inherent in leaving the primary vocational role behind
The social insecurity of leaving a vocational grouping behind
The fear of entering a new social and hierarchical group
A shared collective dislike or disrespect for current managers
Previous experience of the changing behaviour of those previously promoted to management
The lack of knowledge about what management competences they may already possess
Feeling that they are not “qualified” for management
Comments appreciated.
george edwards
15 Responses
One additional thought
Hi George
I think you have some good issues high-lighted. One generic issue that has been high-lighted to me in a performance coaching situation, (that I don’t think is covered in your list), is when a team member is promoted to manage the same team that they were once a member of – this links heavily into the issues you high-light about where someone in this situation ‘fits in’ but even more so. I guess what I am talking about is the level of social interaction it is appropriate to have once someone becomes ‘the manager’.
hope that helps
Clive
Motivators may hold the key?
You may find it useful to also look at this issue from the perspective of motivators. I find the work of Dr John Hunt (London School of Business) quite aposite – esp. the Work Interests Schedule, which looks at motivators in terms of:
Money
Stress Avoidance
Risk Avoidance
Job Structure
Avoid Working Alone
Affiliate With Team
Recognition
Power
Autonomy/variety/creativity
Personal Growth
Visit http://www.mtsmanagement.co.uk – no interest, just a satisfied customer!
Regards
Martin
Another one to add?
Hi George
It might be that people who are really good at their job, say as a teacher or nurse or receptionist, are reluctant to move into management because they will no longer be teaching, nursing or making people welcome to the organisation. This was certainly the case when I was in the NHS. There is now the role of “super nurse” which has enabled excellent nurses to stay “at the bedside” and still move up the ladder, salary wise.
Hope this helps.
Jenny
Why should you want to become your enemy?
George
You have identified all the seperate reasons perfectly.
The sum of all those reasons is that the manager is someone who is disliked, disrespected and seen as a useless addendum to the organisation whose prime role seems to be to stop everybody else from performing.
Why would anyone want to become such a negative influence on the ability of their peers to perform.
The only way to get people to want to become managers is to make a huge pay differential, 30 pieces of silver seems to be the going rate, or give them the ability through enlightened training to be able to have a positive influence on the performance of the organisation.
How can you be proud of your effect as a manger if you don’t know how to manage?
At the moment this training does not exist.
A manager may be trained in Law, Finance and Business Strategy but there is no module in that education that shows them how to manage people.
Until managers understand the influence of their behaviour on the performance of the people they manage there will be no change.
From professional specialist to amateur manager
George
While I don’t disagree with any of the points you have mentioned I am inclined to think that Jennifer has hit upon the number one, single biggest issue.
We work with a range of professionals and specialists including scientists, economists, accountants, trainers, lawyers, technicians and many more ‘vocational’ roles. Most of them didn’t go in to that specialism to be managers. But, in some cases, there comes a point where they find themselves needing to be a manager. This can be uncomfortable because it involves a different skills set (often very different, and often not the skills they feel they have most naturally). The status is also different – sometimes there may be more seniority from an organisational point of view but, ironically, less kudos from a professional point of view.
Add to this that managing other specialists can be very different from more general forms of management (which is all too often not reflected in the training that they get) and it is easy to see why it is not an attractive option.
I know many people who wouldn’t touch a management job with a barge pole. It is a shame that they are sometimes regarded as odd by mainstream managers for holding this view. It is also a shame that some organisations push people like this in to being managers if they want promotion. Jennifer’s example from nursing should be an example to us all.
Graham
Why move from something you like doing to something you don’t li
I also agree that Jennifer has highlighted one of the most important areas, and have one or two others to add.
I have had the experience of moving from a job I enjoyed (a combination of training and guidance for unemployed people)into management, when the project manager retired. Unlike some of the respondents, I had a very positive role model in the retiring project manager, and his example was the chief reason that I was able to make a successful go of the management role. However, I no longer was able to do the work with clients that I had enjoyed, and the bulk of my time was spent in project management takes, particularly writing funding applications, monitoring the delivery of the funded projects, strategic management, staff management, etc. Although I was pleasantly surprised to find that I could do these new tasks, the last two were the only one of these that I enjoyed, and absolutely hated the application / monitoring / reporting tasks that made up a large part of my work.
The other major dissatisfaction (and major stressor) was that, whereas I had been well-supported in my previous role by the former project manager, I was totally unsupported (and frequently undermined) in my managerial job. I did not even seek the job, and was not asked to take it up – it was just assumed that I would keep the project going when the previous manager retired. As a middle manager, I was then in the position of having responsibility for the quality delivery of the project for the clients and funders, and the achievement of an external quality assurance standard, without having any of the power to ensure that the necessary quality was delivered (as the resources were in the hands of a senior management). I believe that responsibility without adequate power is often a major source of stress at middle management level. I also had to support my excellent and co-operative staff without getting any support for myself from above.
When I left that job, I deliberately took a training job, in which I am again very happy. Although I am perfectly able to do it successfully, I will never touch management again!
Managers often earn less!
Whilst agreeing with all comments made, I would add one other point which is mainly relevant to managing sales teams.
Salespeople are generally paid on achieving sales targets and bonusses are directly related to sales made. In addition they will earn unlimited commission on sales made over target, i.e. the more they sell, the more they can earn.
Sales Managers, however, are usually paid bonus on achievement of their team’s targets as a whole, with no additional income for sales over target. This often means that although their basic salary has increased, their earning capacity is considerably reduced.
This is not an incentive for salespeople wanting to progress in their organisation.
Insufficient preparation
I have found that reluctance also stems from the lack of preparation before the role is taken on. Most management development takes place once an individual is in the role but many need that input beforehand. Call it an induction to management if you like and consider it as a management training programme (not development). If they lack knowledge or have poor role models then surely something should be done before they do the job. It’s a skilled professional role and organisations don’t give it the investment it needs, so no wonder people don’t want to take the risk! Furthermore, particularly in the case of promotions, people need to understand it’s a different job to what they have been doing and some preparation for that will help.
Peter is spot on. Read his book.
Peter and Jennifer have said what’s worth saying.
For those who actually want to solve this problem, read Peter’s Book “Breaking the Mould” and then get Peter to institute training in your company. The improvement in managerial expertise will amaze you because productivity, morale and innovation will skyrocket.
Best regards, Ben
Author “Leading People to be Highly Motivated and Committed”
http://www.bensimonton.com
Square pegs for square holes
Your question struck a chord with me. I am in my late 40s and a very junior manager. I have absolutely no desire to be a manager and sometimes I wonder what I was smoking when I decided to take promotion. What follows is a personal perspective on why I don’t want to be a manager.
1. I don’t want to be responsible for anything or anyone I have no control over and I have yet to meet a manager at any level who can honestly say they have both responsibility and control.
2. I am constantly surprised at how quickly managers lose knowledge of how the most basic processes they are ultimately responsible for work.
3. The adage that, “those that can do, those that can’t manage / teach”, is a self evident truth in my experience.
4. Management is an overdone concept. To achieve we need leaders. In my experience people manage themselves well enough when they have the incentive.
5. Managers interfere and get in the way. I like to be left alone to get on with the job. I don’t mind being told it’s no longer necessary but I do mind someone who knows less than me telling me such and such won’t work when I can actually see it working.
6. I’m a perfectionist, managers are not, they tend to be pragmatists.
7. I like the freedom to say, “No, I disagree”, without the fear of blotting my copybook.
8. I believe that the person doing the job is the most important, after all if they weren’t none of the organisations we work for would exist. Organisations value managers more than technicians, thats why they pay them more.
9. A managers job is simply to allow the people doing the job to get on with it as efficiently and effectively as possible. I can count one hand the managers I have met in 29 years who do this.
10. I am not motivated by money or responsibility and I distrust those who are because they are self referenced rather than externally referenced. I am motivated by the respect of my peers and those I in turn respect.
11. Management theories come and go but people don’t.
All of which probably sounds dispeptic, it isn’t meant to be and I’m not as bloody minded as some of the above indicates.
I am one of a large group of people who actually enjoy what they do, are good at it and don’t want to be promoted out of it. Unfortunately organisations don’t seem to recognise this.
I am not one of Sir John Harvey-Jones’, “toxic work force”, but by ‘eck its tempting sometimes.
Regards
Alex Paterson
Not sure…
I really appreciate Alexander’s personal perspective and having the courage to share it so openly.
It struck me as I read his contribution that it just may be the case that his view of managers (and I recognised much of what Alexander wrote!) may be down to the fact that his role models were very much like himself – doing the job for the wrong reasons arguably, and without the training and support and clarity of focus etc to do a decent job, managed in turn by people of a similar background.
Could it also be the case that managers, having this perception of their own standing in the eyes of their team, and remebering their own thoughts about management, live ‘down to’ these expectations – a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy?
An interesting thread!
Good managers/bad managers?
I appreciate where Martin is coming from but in my experience nobody ever tries or wants to do a bad job.
Managers want to be able to mange well, they want to be responsible for soaring profits, amazing moral and high retention.
If they could they would, but they can’t so they don’t.
What Alexander wrote was true, if he is not able to do a good job as a manager then he does not want to do it.
And while none of his role models are able to do a good job as a manager then he has little prospect of being able to find out how to do a good job.
Until we can provide the tools that managers need to manage well then we will be stuck in the same catch 22.
I personally look forward to the day when Alexander feels able to manage because with his perspective he will be able to avoid the barriers that most mangers put up that stop their workforce performing.
When that happens his workforce will be exceptional.
Alexander’s comments say more about his company than himself.
Alexander’s comments make it clear that his work environment played a major role in how Alexander relates to management.
I once took over a 1300 person unionized group and was told by my boss that those who used the group’s services hated it. I was directed to either effect its total demise or fix it, my choice.
I chose to fix it. When I started, almost no one wanted to enter management ranks for all the reasons Alexander provided plus a few. The ones who were willing were of poor quality.
After about a year and a half of asking employees what they needed to do a better job and giving it to them, a task every management person was required to perform and led by myself, a union steward entered my office. He said that he did not know what I was doing, did not care to know but wanted me to keep doing it. He said that he had hated to come to work for 15 years and now he loved to come to work. So would I please keep doing whatever it was that I was doing. He shook my hand and left.
At that point, I knew that we had turned the corner. From that day forward, we had many more people wanting to enter management ranks than we needed and all of the ones chosen were of the highest caliber.
I am not saying that all the people who were very good at what they were doing wanted to become managers. We tried very hard to make people aware of what the change would mean to them and that being a supervisor was just another job and should not be looked upon as some sort of promotion. Besides, our senior technicians and mechanics were very valuable and without them we would not have been able to produce output that would blow away the competition. But there are people who are suited to leadership and management and those were the ones we tried hard to find.
Hope this helps the discussion.
Best regards, Ben Simonton
http://www.bensimonton.com
Alexander’s comments say more about his company than himself.
Alexander’s comments make it clear that his work environment played a major role in how Alexander relates to management.
I once took over a 1300 person unionized group and was told by my boss that those who used the group’s services hated it. I was directed to either effect its total demise or fix it, my choice.
I chose to fix it. When I started, almost no one wanted to enter management ranks for all the reasons Alexander provided plus a few. The ones who were willing were of poor quality. To say that management was hated by the workforce would be accurate and as far as I could tell there was more than enough justification for this hatred.
After about a year and a half of asking employees what they needed to do a better job and giving it to them, a task every management person was required to perform and led by myself, a union steward entered my office. He said that he did not know what I was doing, did not care to know but wanted me to keep doing it. He said that he had hated to come to work for 15 years and now he loved to come to work. So would I please keep doing whatever it was that I was doing. He shook my hand and left.
At that point, I knew that we had turned the corner. From that day forward, we had many more people wanting to enter management ranks than we needed and all of the ones chosen were of the highest caliber.
I am not saying that all the people who were very good at what they were doing wanted to become managers. We tried very hard to make people aware of what the change would mean to them and that being a supervisor was just another job and should not be looked upon as some sort of promotion. Besides, our senior technicians and mechanics were very valuable and without them we would not have been able to produce output that would blow away the competition. But there are people who are suited to leadership and management and those were the ones we tried hard to find.
Hope this helps the discussion.
Best regards, Ben Simonton
http://www.bensimonton.com
followt hru
Thanks for the fascinating insights everyone has given. I have mailed individually to anyome whose email clicked up, but if I you missed thanks anyway.
I’d like to see if any further comments emerge, and at some time I’ll put a “public” version of the paper I’m doing up on http://www.TheGeorgeEdwards.com
George