Loading ...Building a Senior Management Team is as easy as ABC, so long as that doesn’t stand for Antony, Brutus and Cassius!
You can usually judge a good director by the strength and quality of their direct reports, especially once the director has been in post for more than twelve months. By then the “Number One” should have shaped the senior management team (SMT) into an effective unit, capable of running things smoothly themselves with the least amount of direction and supervision.
In an ideal world, the best SMT should have at least two or three managers of the right calibre, ready and willing to step into the hot seat at short notice should the need, or the opportunity, arise. And, of course, the rest of the SMT who are not yet ready for the prime role should at least be made of the right stuff and working towards the top spot, even if they still need a couple more years’ managerial experience under their belts.
So much for utopian daydreaming, reality rarely measures up.
Although to be fair, as far as individuals are concerned I have worked with and for some very good managers. Nevertheless, when taken as a whole unit, in the past 25 years I have only seen one exceptionally good senior management team, whose reward for persistent excellence was to be disbanded at short notice by an apparently ungrateful business.
But that’s another story.
Today I want to focus on a particular cultural behaviour that too often gets in the way of building an effective management team: insecurity.
Of course, this is a fundamental aspect of human nature that should have very little to do with the finer nuances of managing technology successfully. But in my experience it is a critical complicating factor and widely prevalent. So many of us seem to spend an awful lot of our precious time, energy and money dealing with the sometimes deep-rooted personal insecurities of ourselves and our colleagues.
These behaviours manifest themselves in a variety of ways but one of the most obvious symptoms of insecurity can often be recognised by a management team that seems bereft of a balanced pool of natural successors to the director.
I honestly believe that this simple litmus test is a very powerful performance indicator because it’s usually a clear sign of an insecure director, desperately anxious to avoid being challenged from below.
We have to realise that such an insecure director will always want to be the alpha chimp at the tea party and is therefore likely to preside over a team that may well achieve some very good short-term delivery statistics but actually offers very little long-term persistent value to the organisation because the depth and breadth of management potential and initiative become totally subservient to the self-preservation needs of the so-called leader. Over time, the corporate gene pool gets shallower and shallower, thus reinforcing the insecure individual’s position while progressively weakening the organisation.
Obviously what we need to do is to foster a new breed of confident and secure directors whose confidence and security is firmly founded upon being completely comfortable with capable subordinates who could easily be their peers, let alone successors.
And then perhaps we can finally move beyond the Julius Caesar mentality of some directors, who still fear that the simple ABC of building a senior management team is all about keeping Antony, Brutus and Cassius in their place.
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Of course, this is diametrically opposed to what I just read here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/oct/23/dumbing-down about teaching the next generation of leaders….
Therefore, it follows that we’re creating our own downfall, and the paradigm shift being called for needs to start at the University level….
good
I have observed a real difference between senior teams in public and private sector organisations. In the public sector I have seen on multiple occasions CEO’s ( Or equiv) systematicaly set about removing their most capable subordinates. This is of course to avoid political threat. Without the driver of competitors and shareholders to demand performance from the senior team, there is no incentive to keep any level of competence in that senior team . Any higher level scruitiny in these organisations will come from politicians – who do not know of any other behaviour – so see the actions as normal.
What this means of course, is that when the CEO does eventualy leave, there is no successor available of any ability to take over – so one of a pool of even lesser ability is destined to be the new CEO …
and so we spiral down ….
I doubt vey much whether you will be able to suddenly (ie within a period of 5 years)develop a pool of young aspiring managers. Whereas if we channel our efforts into talent management we may be able to gain head way. To me the issue is about raising the standards of senior management through pragmatic self assessment of their ability. Unfortunately ‘business schools’ tend to focus on new methods and methodologies rather than corrective approaches. Consequently the criticism of academia per se therefore seems a little unfair. After acedemia is about the deveopment and growth of young people, whether they are commerce-friendly is another thing.
Senior management should be mature enough to stand up and be counted. For that you need good leaders, or at least decent role models.