Why are managers so badly trained?

 March 15 – Many hours of work have gone in over the weekend, in between mildly unfocussed trips to look at possible new houses. Neither is designed to create a low stress environment.

The cause of the work was company number 2. I’ve clearly unleashed enthusiasm there. That’s great. The trouble is those there have little idea how to take this forward. This has become horribly apparent.

First of all decision making processes are weak, and experience at rational decision making is weaker still.

Second, the ability to write a coherent argument is seemingly non-existent. Some of these people can hardly string a sentence together in an email and yet have positions of responsibility.

Third, turning strategic thinking into deliverable plans is something that is going to be hard right now – this has just not been asked of them for too long.

All of which has left me desperately trying to work out a training strategy that can be delivered to fill in the most basic skills these people need.

We’ll be starting with training in Plain English.

Basic word processing and IT skills are also lacking.

And then we’ll go on to things like decision making.

Three thoughts occur to me. The first is that it’s immensely depressing how little these people can have developed since they left school. Second that it’s extraordinary how under-qaulified most so called managers are. Third, I appreciate that this team can’t deliver all the required changes, at least as yet.

Bright ideas are not the same as having an ability to deliver. As we all know, any number of people down the pub know just how to solve all the problems in the economy, and almost none of them can deliver any of their plan. So too at company number two.

This is going to be a long haul.