Wally Bock of the the Three Star Leadership Blog shared some great thoughts in a comment to my previous post on Performance Management and the Limitations of Supervisory/Management Training. They were so good, I thought they deserved their own post!
We don't model good supervisory behavior, nor does much of our training even teach new supervisors to identify and use good role models. And we don't hold supervisors accountable for supervisory work.
There's another factor, too. We get lousy supervision because we resolutely promote the wrong people. Since we don't recognize that management is a particular kind of work, we promote technicians to management. It's like selecting golf coaches based on the fact that a person is a great volleyball player.
We should be looking for people who can do management work, like helping people succeed, making decisions and confronting people about their performance and behavior. But we don't and so new managers are not only left to sink or swim, they're invited to take the whole team to the bottom with them.
Wally's blog is rich with wisdom about leadership and management - if you aren't already a reader, be sure to check it out!
I'm flattered. I hardly ever get accused of having wisdom. Seriously, I thought your original post was one of the best I've seen on the supervisory training issue, so being able to piggy-back on it is a "good and joyful thing."
Posted by: Wally Bock | August 20, 2007 at 05:48 PM