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Performance Management

Published November 2007

Why Don't More Managers Coach and Develop Their People?

 

  Terence Traut

Recently, a colleague asked me, "Why don't M.B.A. programs teach their students how to manage the performance of their people? They teach them finance, business, marketing, organizational systems; but they don't teach them how to work with and through people." I decided to ask for the opinions of two of my favorite thinkers on such topics, Warren Bennis and Henry Mintzberg.

Dr. Bennis, arguably the "father of leadership," having been the first to clearly differentiate management from leadership, believes that "so little of [the M.B.A. curriculum] is grounded in actual business practices; the focus of graduate business education has become increasingly less and less relevant to practitioners." In his Harvard Business Review article, "How Business Schools Lost Their Way," Dr. Bennis describes how business schools, once trade schools for management apprentices, have evolved into centers of research, which, while valuable for theory and science, are devoid of "the stuff of management."

In his article, Dr. Bennis makes reference to "one outspoken critic, McGill University professor Henry Mintzberg." I called Dr. Mintzberg for his thoughts, knowing he would shoot straight from the hip:
Why don't managers coach and develop their people? Even if students could learn how to develop and manage the performance of their people, would they? They and their incumbent colleagues certainly don't seem to now!

TT: Why aren't managers and supervisors taking the time to coach and develop employees, knowing that they are the ones who do the work?

HM: There are two broad reasons. The first is the pressure and the pace, particularly in the United States, has gone up enormously, and I don't think that it's just competition. I think there's a kind of freneticism. For example, e-mail makes managers much more frenetic. You're constantly being interrupted, and you feel you need to react instantly. The pace and pressure to respond and react takes away from any time you may have planned to meet with employees or even to walk down the hall to see how employees are doing.

Additionally, the emphasis on shareholder value has made companies much more mercenary. For example, the whole emphasis on leadership has driven a wedge between managers and other people. Everyone struts around pretending to be a leader, and I believe that hinders communication.

There are still many managers who simply don't have people skills. Many have done M.B.A. programs and use that as a way of launching into management positions. They would have never gotten into managerial positions naturally.

Another reason that managers don't spend a lot of time with employees is because of the high turnover/movement. Some companies have policies that turn their managers over every couple of years, which I think is sheer madness. This forces the manager to think, "I'm not going to waste my time, since I'll be gone soon."