The accidental manager

It’s an old cliché that people join organisations but leave managers and I was reminded of this recently whilst speaking to the manager of a medium sized company. They’d recently done a lot of organisational surveys and the results weren’t good: trust was low, many people were discouraged by the style of leadership and parts of the organisation were very unhappy. It started me thinking about those simple – but often powerful – questions that I like to ask.

Pretty much the first question I ask of any new or aspiring manager is “why do you want to be a manager?” The number of people who struggle with that question might surprise you. Often it’s not something that they’ve ever asked themselves before but it’s a question worth thinking about in some detail, even if you have to mull it over for a couple of weeks before coming up with a reason that you feel comfortable with.

I hear many different answers but they broadly break down into three. Some people become a manager because it’s the natural next-step on their career path; if they want to progress within their organisation, they have to move to a management role. Linked to this, for some, is the fact that – in their organisation – it’s the only way to earn more money. Alternatively, some people have a desire to work with and a love of people; for them, the buzz of working closely with people, being responsible for their performance and their development is what leads them into management.

Or, some people become a manager just because they were promoted into it. They were the most productive/technically skilled/best looking in their team and the powers-that-be decided that being so good at whatever it was they did made them the perfect candidate for management. Within this group is a small subset of people who just find themselves there, without having much planned or thought about it and without really knowing what they’re doing there in the first place.

None of these reasons is necessarily a better or worse reason than the others. Whatever anyone’s reason is, it’s their reason and it’s not for me to tell them it’s the wrong one. Nevertheless, I’d argue that, in order to be a successful manager you’d need to (at least) like working with people and want to do it. Perhaps I’m being unduly harsh on the manager in question but these qualities seemed to be lacking – and it seemed like the organisation knew it.