Too Fast, Too Furious?

BY ANDY FIRTH

Many businesses these days are petty good at recognising potential and employing ‘bright young things’ to populate junior management positions. Graduate trainees are taken on and find themselves, often in pretty short order, leading teams populated by people vastly more experienced in the work-a-day jobs of the organisation.

Across different organisations, these people are united by one common theme – a lack of developed skills of leadership.

Those people who are keen, determined and fairly thick-skinned can often enjoy a considerable degree of success. However, in many cases early enthusiasm and optimism turns into disillusionment and a feeling of abandonment.

This is the result of more senior managers confusing potential with skill and quite often leaving the new and shiny junior managers to their own devices. I have talked to a number of young, new managers and they almost invariably relate stories of having had little or no development or useful feedback and then being called to task over their own performance or that of their team.

Jackie, a manager of six months’ vintage with a media company, had just that experience. She had graduated from their training programme and been placed in her first command, a team of six people. Within a few months, the team’s customer satisfaction figures were falling off and previously achieved targets were being missed.

"I had been taught the company way of doing things on my training programme, but when I tried it with the team, they didn’t respond well. It seems they preferred their previous manager. I felt really isolated.”

She was called to speak to her line manager, who wanted to concentrate more on the figures than how she might engage with the team. Fortunately for Jackie, she also had an understanding mentor with whom she could discuss these issues.

Many organisations put in place a mentoring scheme, in which an older and more experienced employee meets with and helps the young manager. Mentoring in the traditional sense is fine as far as it goes, in that it provides a source of advice for the mentored and a sounding board for their questions, woes and ideas.

Mentoring differs from coaching in that, where a coach is working with the person on the process of drawing out their own best solutions, a mentor is assumed to have expert knowledge and be ‘an old hand’ in the actual work.

However, relying on mentoring alone has some inherent dangers. For one, you run the risk of creating a manager who thinks largely as the existing culture dictates. You also might find your fast-track junior manager suddenly thinking like one of the crusty old laggards who’ve been hanging on for redundancy.

Furthermore, the mentored might hold the mentor in awe. Or contempt. And, in my experience at least, mentoring often breaks down for one or more of the following reasons: one party or the other does not like or respect the other; one or both parties can’t be bothered or find time to schedule their appointments; one or other thinks they know best.

To encourage individual thinking, mentoring is not the best suited tool. This is where coaching can help. In this country, it is still frequently seen as the preserve of the upper echelons, a development tool for those managers who have done everything else. But coaching by no means has to be reserved for the top.

Jackie’s mentor, who had actually done her job a number of years before, suggested that she try coaching. At her appraisal, Jackie was able to persuade her manager that some coaching might help. Jackie’s HR manager rang me and we met to see if we could work together. Over the ensuing four sessions Jackie quickly discovered that she had the skills and personality to do the job well, but felt she needed to employ them differently.

"I stopped doing things ‘by the book’, which I found out had been more from nerves than anything else. Instead, I am trying to be more open to different ideas about how we do things, and listen more to my team instead of just telling them what to do.”

As a result, Jackie’s relationship with her team has been steadily improving and they are starting to hit their customer satisfaction targets again.

If a company is prepared to invest the time, money and effort in finding and recruiting the most promising young people, then it makes sense for it to do similarly in developing them. Mentoring can help and training can provide certain skills, but where these often answer the ‘what’, coaching can very much help with the ‘how’.

Coaching can help to fast-track young managers: in developing their own identity within the organisation; in processing information; in assimilating and using skills; in learning how to lead themselves so they can lead others. And when it all becomes a bit too much (and many junior managers, particularly those on the fast track, report a feeling of being overwhelmed sooner or later), the coach can work with them to help them cope.

Personally, I have coached a number of young managers. The themes people bring to coaching vary hugely, but a significant one is making sense of the company’s expectations of them, and how to respond professionally.

The young managers are grateful that their organisation is investing in them and will often respond with loyalty and a rekindled enthusiasm for their job.