Learning from my daughter’s awful experience: why people management skills have gotten worse since Financial Crisis

Done properly, management is one of the most honourable of professions. Right up there alongside nursing and teaching. Because the right kind of manager gets to help others. Full time. Coaching. Teasing out hidden talent. Identifying and untapping potential where less patient beings will only see problems. But bad managers are among the most destructive beings on the planet. When the person in a position of power is self-absorbed, caring for their own rather than the interests of  others, the damage wrought can be nuclear, especially on the young and impressionable. I got a stark reminder of this in the past week through my elder daughter’s experience in her first full time job. – AH  

 By Alec Hogg* 

Alec Hogg - Biznews.comLife’s toughest questions often come from unexpected places. I got a Lulu this week.

My elder daughter recently left her first job. It was a dreary-sounding position at a bank, but we were so proud when was appointed. All grown up and earning a salary while not quite finished her business degree. In a country, nogal, where youth unemployment isn’t far behind South Africa’s 70%.

Unfortunately, despite getting through the door, she hadn’t exactly landed in clover. Her middle-aged supervisor was a nightmare. Totally lacking management skills. Small-minded, inclined to the blame game and excessively controlling without bothering to train she was partial to the butt kissers and playing favourites. And patriotic, which to her mind means someone with a different accent shouldn’t have been hired in the first place.

I had no idea managers like this still exist. Sadly, the lower down an organization one goes, the more contaminated it becomes. People unable to crack a promotion and aren’t particularly skilled at much become “supervisors”. All too often they are given free rein to prey on the young and vulnerable.


An attempt to better understand how this could happen sent me back to Gary Hamel’s superb book The Future of Management. Published six years ago, Hamel preaches openness, transparency and collective responsibility. Judging by the experience of the past week, and multitudes of others that one witnesses daily, his ideas haven’t exactly caught fire.

Not because they aren’t well reasoned or, indeed, appropriate for the Information Age. More likely it’s a result of inertia, evident in all of mankind but multiplied in corporations.

Instead of the Financial Crisis shocking the world into changing, the preferred reaction has been to kick the can down the road. Postpone the inevitable. Make it the future generation’s problem. Hence continued Quantitative Easing. And other delay tactics.

That has had a direct consequence in the corporate environment where Command and Control has made a comeback. Boards put their trust in accountants rather than more creative, entrepreneurial counterparts. So cash balances balloon while new ideas get stymied.

But it cannot last forever.


Hamel argues that managers have become expert at breaking complex tasks into small, repeatable steps. Efforts of tens of thousands of employees have become coordinated and synchronized. Costs can now be calculated to the penny.

Business has become so scientific that profit margins have grown to levels even rabid capitalists would previously not believe possible.

This discipline and efficiency, however, has come at a heavy cost.

The key argument of Hamel’s 280 page book is summarized in a single paragraph: “The machinery of modern management gets fractious, opinionated and free spirited human beings to conform to standards and rules, but in so doing it squanders prodigious quantities of human imagination and initiative.”

My daughter, blessed with a fine mind, has always been encouraged to question, never to blithely accept authority or simply accept that someone with a title knows better. Her development includes a year as an exchange student in France, attending a good school and university and being pushed to think, read and travel.

Her first experience with the world of work has sent a different message.

She is being told that getting ahead requires an alternative skills set. One which might have been borrowed from those brave but misguided souls glorified by the Charge of the Light Brigade that “theirs not to reason why; theirs but to do and die.”


Hamel says the key challenge facing managers is to find a way to alter the bargain: “To keep a tight rein on costs without strangling human imagination; to build organisations where discipline and freedom aren’t mutually exclusive.”

As a father, that cannot come too soon. Next thing the system will be telling my daughter she needs to find a man to support her. That all she requires is honing her cooking rather than management skills, applying her makeup more skillfully and learning to nod at the right times.

Surely she, and her peers, deserve better?

* Alec Hogg is a writer and broadcaster who founded Moneyweb. He now runs Biznews.com. This Rational Alternative column appears weekly in the Financial Mail.

 

 

 

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