Should managers be specialists or people people?

Last week I explored the role of HR specialists so it stands to reason that I should also examine the role of managers who these HR specialists are supposed to support.

Most managers are appointed because they are specialists in their particular field. For example, someone really good at finance or accountancy may one day be appointed to a managerial position where they have staff reporting to them. Quite often these managers are really good at their chosen profession but absolutely suck at managing people. This is, of course, not new to anyone, unless you’ve been stuck under a rock.  How often have you seen this happen?

What I’ve quite often observed is that the lack of managerial skills or even leadership skills is justified by a person’s competence in their specialization. More senior management excuse appalling ‘leadership’ behavior because that person is ‘really good at what they do’. I’m sorry? But why then is that person in a position of influence over others?

Rhema Vaithanathan from Auckland University sent people into a bit of a tail spin recently when she stated that New Zealand Managers are poor at managing people. People don’t really like being told that they suck at something. She also argues that management has a direct influence on productivity. Again, this is not really all that new. Human resource academics have been arguing for a while that managers have a direct influence on the implementation of business strategy (see any work by Peter Boxall and his counterparts if you’d like to explore this in more detail).

There is something to learn from this.  Ideas have been floated about more targeted and wide spread management training to address these competency shortages. ‘Training’ and ‘learning’ are a bit of a soap box for me so I am going to hold off on that one for now. But I do question why management skills and competencies are second priority when appointing or promoting? I go back to the example of a finance manager. The likelihood is that someone will be promoted to this position if they are really good at doing financial stuff. Why? Yes, they may be doing more ‘senior’ financial work as a result of their promotion. But if they suck at leading people, then why put them in charge of people.

I propose a new way of thinking about management: the appointment of people to management positions that are highly skilled at managing and leading people and, who may, have little or no experience in the specialist field there are managing. For example, a finance manager who is not directly involved in undertaking finance related work himself or herself, their team are sufficiently empowered and enabled to do it for them.  When I told my husband this (who is a finance specialist) he asked “who would report financial results to the board?”  Well, you have a finance specialist (who isn’t a manager) who has this as one of their major important responsibilities. The individual team members are empowered and enabled to take on more ‘senior’ responsibilities. This creates very distinct career paths: that of a manager and that of a specialist, with specialists seldom becoming managers.

This proposition does require different and possibly more complex competencies of managers. They don’t necessarily have in depth knowledge of the specialist field but have enough empathy to see things through the eyes of their team. They are competent in coaching and mentoring. They can ask the right questions of their direct reports and provide them with support and motivation. How many managers do you know who can do this really well? How do we develop people into these managers? I’m going to ponder that and come back to you. But if you have any ideas or thoughts then let me know. Just imagine what kind of productivity improvements would result from managers whose main priority was managing and leading their people.