Or at least that’s what Forbes says in a research done with Gallup in 2019. Over 80% of employees leave their jobs because of their boss. Basically, if you look at these bleak statistics, it turns out that being a manager is super bad, why would you do it?
On the other hand, one of the first things my daughter asked me about my career at a young age was whether I was a boss. Which surprised me beyond measure, because although she did not understand professions, she understood the power ratio to the level at which she could give it enough value to remember it.
So here’s how we have two antagonistic currents, one through which society wants from you, and you implicitly from it, to become a manager, but life beats the movie and statistics is not on your side, telling you that you have 71% chance of being unhappy in your new position. And the reason more than 80% of people will leave the place they work is because, in one way or another, you as a manager have not met their expectations.
The equation tends to eliminate the unknowns in another study by CareerBuilder.com in 2020 that found that 58% of managers in the 34 countries in the study never did any managerial studies. They were not taught to do their job as managers.
Hence, I ask you from the heart to make an effort of imagination and think about what it would be like to go to the artistic skating Olympics, and everyone who walks on the ice never had any specialized training, or any coach. What would their dance look like, and how long would you stay on the bench until you decide to leave? And that’s true in any sport, any skill that requires mastery. Sure, you can pleasantly surprise your friends with a scheme on ice, or a football dribbling, or a new move at snooker or bowling, but if you want to live from it, you’ll need a lot more than that. You will need learning, practice, feedback, resilience, coaching, day after day, month after month, year after year.
Being a manager is not as hard as being a good manager and defying statistics so that you are in the 29% who enjoy their job. And since no one is born learned, or we can never learn enough that we’ll have nothing to learn, the success of companies lies largely in the vision and execution capacity of those who have this role. And if you follow the figures above, you will realize that investing in manager education means, among other things, greater job satisfaction, even better staff retention and obviously better performance on any level.
This is why we believe that the education of managers is the starting point in moving from amateurs to professionals. We do not assume that people will learn by themselves, nor that everyone will learn the same, so on the list of necessary things we need to help our clients with is the basic package of managerial education: how you manage resources, how you use time more efficiently, how you give and take feedback and understand what your people want from you, how you motivate them, lead them and, last but not least, how you make the right decisions. We call it First Time Manager Academy, it’s like a mini MBA spread over 8 online modules of 3 hours each, with different trainers and small homeworks between modules, and in recent years we’ve done it a few dozen times, but never in an OPEN format like now.
You can find out more HERE.
And seriously, who would come out on the ice without learning to skate, waiting to be booed and see people leaving?
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