How Do Your Managers Grow?

How do your managers grow? This winter is a great time to ask this question. As the respected presidential advisor, Chauncey Gardner, said in the book and movie Being There, “Prepare in the fall and winter for growth in the spring.” Also in these precarious economic times, managers play an even more important critical role in helping, engaging, and motivating employees.

Leaders now are inclined to take three different approaches to growing managers, based on recent research I’ve been involved in, anecdotes I’ve heard, and business media reports. In the broadest manner, these approaches are:

·         Cultivating managers by treating them as leaders—not just as up and coming leaders, but current leaders—and helping them grow and mature.

·         Letting managers alone and those who want to grow will take responsibility for their own personal development.

·         Going to extremes, one month tending to managers as if they’re rare orchids and then the next month, ignoring them as if they’re weeds.

When resources are as tight as they are today, it’s important to identify what approach your leaders have adopted. As Chauncey also said, “The garden must be fertilized.” So as you consider how you spend your time, budget and other resources on manager communications, you want to make sure you’ve got the right type and amount of fertilizer and you’re spreading it in the right places.

(Keep in mind that those of us from farming backgrounds view fertilizer as a positive. You use it as a tool to support plant growth. And considering the economic trough most of us are in right now, communication support for managers may be one of the few supplements available. It’s tough to commit to training and development dollars this year.)

So what do you do?  Before you make any more commitments to manager communication, consider taking these three actions:

1.   Determine the intent of your top leaders. What’s their philosophy about identifying and grooming managers? To be do their current job well? To be better? To be promoted into new roles? What about the actual practices your organization follows? Are the practices and principles aligned? And do all managers have a shot getting help with their personal development, or are only a few tapped as being hi-po?  (This is “high potential” in biz speak; “highway patrol” in the wheat fields and back roads of Oklahoma).

2.   Confirm that your leaders’ current attitude and practices about managers’ development matches the leaders’ goals. Also double check that the leaders’ reality meshes with the organization’s needs today and for the foreseeable future.  In my experience, very few organizations in the universe have clearly articulated their approach to manager development.  Some individual leaders will be very attentive to identifying and preparing successors, but for most it seems an afterthought. In this case, you want to watch the walk, not listen to the talk because walk means more than talk. (As Tony Simons so powerfully explains in this new book, The Integrity Dividend: Leading by the Power of Your Word, his research shows that business leaders who actually do what they say they will do enjoy better business results.)

3.   Tailor your communication support so that it serves as a bridge between current and desired states of manager development. You’ll serve everyone well, including managers, leaders and the organization. For example, you don’t want to get so far out ahead helping mid-managers lead a change initiative if the leaders with the official power will turn their backs on their efforts, or worse yet, contradict them. You’ll deflate the managers’ enthusiasm and you’ll confuse employees. On the other hand, you don’t want to treat managers and employees as the same, when leaders want managers to start thinking and acting more as “we” the leadership team than “me” as in WIIFM employee.

As you design your approach, you may find you need to team up with others in the organization, such as leaders and HR and organization development pros. This partnership is especially critical if you need to change the organization’s culture. In this case, you’ll need more levers than just manager communication.

Like Chauncey, you can be a major architect of your president’s and other leaders’ policies toward manager development. Yet to be fully effective, you need to make sure you’re in sync with your leaders and your organization. And as Chauncey also advised, “If the roots are not severed, all will be well in the garden.”

Liz Guthridge is a consultant, author, and trainer specializing in strategic change communications. Department leaders of Fortune 1000 companies hire Liz and her firm Connect Consulting Group LLC when they need their people—who are confused, angry or in denial—to adopt complex new initiatives so they can quickly change the way they work. For more information, contact Liz, liz.guthridge@connectconsultinggroup.com or 510-527-1213. Follow Liz on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/lizguthridge.