Why have we stopped training managers?

When I first started my career back in the early 90s, being promoted to a role where you managed other people was a big deal.

The promotion was announced, but then you had to attend a practical course, where you were taught the skills needed to manage individuals and a team. Soft skills. At the end of the course was an assessment.

If you didn't pass the assessment, you didn't get the promotion. Sit back down for another 6 months (minimum) and reflect on the feedback (which was detailed).

This wasn't unique to where I worked. Companies like GE and Toyota made a big thing about their management training programs. Government departments across the UK would heavily invest in soft skills training for managers.

This was taken so seriously, in fact, that the UK Government of the time set up a special body - Investors in People - to define, measure, and offer accreditation against a standard for people management.

So what went wrong?

Now I'm seeing people pushed into management roles because it's the only way to get a pay rise. Companies are stuck in a promotional grading program that dates back to the 80s. The idea of paying for value delivered to the business, or giving people the soft skills to succeed, seems to have vanished.

Some of these people promoted are genuinely bad managers. Legendary seagull managers who fly in, make a huge noise, shit everywhere, and then fly off again. Some are brown-nosers and narcissists who got the promotion because they know how to suck up and stroke egos.

But the vast majority are people who are out of their depth. They've had no support, no training, and their promotion boils down to "You've been here the longest, you get to lead the team".

This is a recipe for disaster.

Good managers don't learn their skills by osmosis. They don't magically pick things up by being in the presence of their peers - and not least because their peers are in the same boat.

I had a client with a terrible management team. Their approach was to tell new team leads to go and read some books on management if they wanted some tips. Not an actual recommendation for a specific book (I had my suspicions the CIO couldn't actually read) - just "go and browse Amazon and read a few".

Shockingly, the company had a high rate of attrition, with over 80% of newly promoted managers leaving within 6 months. The C-suite decided that they were promoting "the wrong people". You can imagine how well that turned out for them.

There are business incubators like YCombinator that offer training and support to founders. Organisations like these are, frankly, a cancer on society. Founders aren't taught to build and run a sustainable business - they are taught to sell an idea, land investment, and do nothing but achieve growth (which means userbase, not revenue) for 3-5 years until they can cash out. I have yet to meet a YCombinator alumnus who is a decent human being, let alone a capable manager and competent leader.

At a startup I worked at, the leadership team had repeated the failures from a few years ago. They had no sustainable growth strategy, thought that users equalled success, and so burnt through their capital at a ferocious rate, with no concrete business goals, until they ran out of cash and had to lay off 60% of the business. It was like reliving the dot-com boom all over again. The CEO, a YCombinator alumni (what a coup for the business to land a CEO with such a track record!), couldn't even manage to break the news himself.

He read out a statement prepared by the legal team, which was already posted on the company's website. No personalisation, no acknowledgment of leadership's failure, no humanity. Just reading from a text document for 20 minutes on an all-hands call. This is the calibre of leadership that incubators like YCombinator turn out.

The other exception to this lack of training is evidence of a worrying trend. Companies with poor, clique-based leadership, that hire in an external consultancy (normally personal friends of the CEO or someone on the board). Then they have some magical week-long "High Performance Teams" retreat, which largely consists of fluffing key people's egos while proving your loyalty to the cult of leadership. I've seen it happen at several clients, and it's a huge red flag. Heaven's Gate as an MBA case study.

Work is a job, not a lifestyle choice. Give people the genuine tools they need to succeed, not to perpetuate crappy leadership. This is hardly disruptive, groundbreaking new thinking - we have known this for decades and decades.

I'd like to offer some solutions, but the reality is that "spend time, money, and effort to train people to be good managers" is just not going to happen. Across the "business leaders" of all industries, especially in IT and cybersecurity, money spent training soft skills for managers is seen as wasted budget: a legacy from the past that's no longer needed when people have AI assistants on their phones and online education portals.

Actually asking for support or training is now seen as a sign that someone is not cut out for a management role. They're not a "self-starter"; they lack "success motivation". I've heard a Head of HR complain that a newly promoted team lead asking for soft skills training was "being lazy".

If we look at how most organisations operate today, we can broadly break companies down into 5 tiers:

- you should train yourself, you weakling. And you've just qualified yourself out of the hiring process. Next!

- we have a defined training program that basically teaches you nothing but how to worship and revere our Great Leader, who can do no wrong. Welcome to FAANG!

- we give you a budget that barely covers a 1-week course, and finance has to approve it (even though they know nothing about the content). And if you leave within 2 years, you have to pay it all back.

- we give you a budget that barely covers a 1-week course, and finance has to approve it (even though they know nothing about the content).

- we work with these training providers and offer these certification paths as part of your role.

- we work with these training providers and have defined training and personal development programs.

The exceptions to this are few and far between. SMEs are being squeezed today more than ever: they recognise the need to get and retain exceptional talent, but they struggle with the budget and the capability to train and support. The big consultancies will offer MBAs, but these are more about building a network and expanding influence rather than picking up genuinely useful day-to-day management skills.

Companies increasingly view employees as components that can be replaced when they fail. They can always find a cheaper replacement, and if not, the various visa programs have been abused for years. I know of a company that has replaced its entire 8-person HR team with a chatbot in Slack. Really.

My advice for any job seekers or new managers is to ask about the training that an employer offers, and factor that in to understanding how taking that role will progress your career, versus the likelihood of the company being a toxic place to work.

(Oh, and check if the leadership team came out of YCombinator.)