Leaving them unprepared to lead

Intro

Very few careers start with leadership. But when they do change lanes and take on responsibility for both people management and more strategic thinking, most people’s technical roles haven’t given them the chance to practise either of them.

What's the issue?

1. The likes of Logistics and Manufacturing are exceptions to the rule that says you have to make good headway towards mastering your technical role before you’re allowed to lead.

That's a problem because leadership isn’t just a big challenge, it’s two big challenges. Arguably the biggest career step you’ll ever take is going from having no-one reporting to you to having one person reporting to you. And as if that wasn’t enough, leadership also requires a more strategic capability; thinking beyond your own team’s scope, and beyond your immediate issues du jour.

2. High-value, highly-skilled roles – such as solicitor, insurance broker, data scientist, engineer etc. – all require high levels of education and experience in their respective fields of expertise. What none of them tend to include though is leadership education and experience.

3. The Peter Principle (which has been around since British Leyland was showcasing poor leadership in the 1970’s) is the concept that a person is promoted to their lowest level of incompetence. Some are then promoted further, to even higher levels of incompetence (possibly by others also suffering from the PP who don’t know any better).

4. The lower level of people- and strategy-capability typical of most technical roles isn’t just an issue for new leaders, it’s a problem for seasoned leaders too. That’s because at best, the level of leadership training, coaching and mentoring they’ve received in all their years of leading represents a small fraction of the technical training that relevant roles receive.

5. They say people don’t leave their organisations, they leave their bosses. And yet still you leave your most valuable people – like your top revenue generators, inventors and project managers - in the hands of people who are expected to become good leaders by what, osmosis? This makes no sense (face plant emoji).

Consider this

1. What percentage of your leaders would you rate as good? And if you want to define good, imagine you were to set up your own business, would you actively seek them out to bring them with you? Before you answer that, just remind yourself that leadership includes:

• Understanding enough of the technical side of the work to organise the people, products, processes, and programmes.

• Understanding enough about the people to attract and retain them to do their best work, and develop the culture.

• Understanding enough about the business to contribute to the strategy, and to challenge and collaborate with colleagues.

Even to the most voracious workaholic, that’s a shedload of workload. And every day, you ask your leaders to do all this and more when nearly all of their training has prepared them to be a technical expert in their field.

2. Great leaders are a rarer breed than great technical people. And I also put it to you that leaders can make more of a difference, because of the one-to-many effect they have on others’ performance.

3. Just because you don’t need to be qualified to be a leader doesn’t mean you shouldn’t aim for professional standards, and CPD. And no, that isn’t going to be achieved by throwing people into leadership roles and expecting them to figure it out, even after years in the role. That’s not delegation, it’s abdication.

Try this

Treat leadership development no differently than the CPD of your technical roles. Because while leadership theory is much simpler to learn than writing algorithms or getting a balance sheet to balance (for which membership of the Magic Circle is required), it’s much harder to deploy in practice. You know that because you see it every day.