Most first time managers are categorised by the Chartered Management Institute as being “accidental managers.” We all know the story. Someone who is a great at what the business does, who shows commitment and enthusiasm, is promoted to team leader. Whether or not they have the skills to lead and manage people is a matter of pure chance. The Chartered Management Institute describe them as “accidental managers” and they account for 80% of first time managers. Some of them have a natural inclination to leading people and do ok, some learn over the years and other just become bad managers.
Download the report from the Cage Research Centre
When you consider that research shows that a competent manager had about twice as much impact on the team’s performance as a competent worker, it seems surprising that we don’t pay more attention to identifying and training good managers.
According to a report by Ben Weidmann of the Harvard Kennedy School, and his co-authors, there are three identifiable ways in which good managers achieve great performance from their teams:
- monitoring workers to avoid wasting time
- allocating workers to tasks that maximize their comparative advantage
- motivating their team to exert effort.
It may be important to note that the combination of monitoring and effective delegation, suggests that the monitoring used did not involve micro-management.
The key takeaway from the report’s conclusion is that:
“skills are much better predictors of manager performance than personality traits or preferences. This is important because preferences for leadership and qualities like extraversion and self-confidence increase the probability of promotion in many workplaces. Our findings suggest that firms who proactively engage the widest possible set of candidates, and screen for skills such as economic decision making, could see substantial improvements in managerial quality and team performance.”