What key challenges are you currently facing in your role?

What key activities are you currently completing in your role?

It's mostly about Reward, right now, and trying to unpick the consequences of a series of recent legal cases so far as they impact upon the contractual pay and reward of public sector employees, to try to find a solution that is legally compliant, acceptable to the unions, fair to employees but doesn't actually dig the fiscal hole any deeper than it absolutely has to.

It's a bloody nightmare.

What key challenges are you currently facing in your role?

See above.

However, what makes it worse is what I have already been beating the drum about here and elsewhere for at least the last twelve months: the standard of management knowledge and skills among mid-level managers has reached a shocking state. And by no means only in the public sector. If anything, the private sector seems to be even worse. Ten years ago, we could hardly move for MBAs, MILMs and MCIMs. And if they didn't have institutional membership, at the very least they had two or three Level 3 qualifications under their belts.

But it is increasingly rare to meet managers with actual qualifications or undertaking qualifications. It is becoming completely routine for even junior HR staff to be coaching even quite senior managers on the most basic of management tasks, like how to conduct sickness absence review or compose a SMART objective. It feels like too many managers have failed upwards, bouncing out of struggling in one management role into a more senior role without any of the knowledge to be able to coach their subordinates.

And it's not that they don't want to learn. They will stay on Teams calls for hours talking through their various issues, getting walked through the policies, and having the fundamental principles of management explained to them with riveted attention. But persuading the budget holders to release the money and the time for them to get this knowledge in a structured, educational setting that gives them an actual qualification to rest on is next to impossible.

What challenges can you see coming around the corner in the next few months?

What is keeping you up at night?

Juggling too many complex projects with zero job security. But that's what you get for being a consultant/contractor.

What key activities are you currently completing in your role?

It's mostly about Reward, right now, and trying to unpick the consequences of a series of recent legal cases so far as they impact upon the contractual pay and reward of public sector employees, to try to find a solution that is legally compliant, acceptable to the unions, fair to employees but doesn't actually dig the fiscal hole any deeper than it absolutely has to.

It's a bloody nightmare.

What key challenges are you currently facing in your role?

See above.

However, what makes it worse is what I have already been beating the drum about here and elsewhere for at least the last twelve months: the standard of management knowledge and skills among mid-level managers has reached a shocking state. And by no means only in the public sector. If anything, the private sector seems to be even worse. Ten years ago, we could hardly move for MBAs, MILMs and MCIMs. And if they didn't have institutional membership, at the very least they had two or three Level 3 qualifications under their belts.

But it is increasingly rare to meet managers with actual qualifications or undertaking qualifications. It is becoming completely routine for even junior HR staff to be coaching even quite senior managers on the most basic of management tasks, like how to conduct sickness absence review or compose a SMART objective. It feels like too many managers have failed upwards, bouncing out of struggling in one management role into a more senior role without any of the knowledge to be able to coach their subordinates.

And it's not that they don't want to learn. They will stay on Teams calls for hours talking through their various issues, getting walked through the policies, and having the fundamental principles of management explained to them with riveted attention. But persuading the budget holders to release the money and the time for them to get this knowledge in a structured, educational setting that gives them an actual qualification to rest on is next to impossible.

What challenges can you see coming around the corner in the next few months?

What is keeping you up at night?

Juggling too many complex projects with zero job security. But that's what you get for being a consultant/contractor.

Hello Robey,

I was really interested to read your perspective about managers. The same thing is happening where I work (higher education), I do an amount of coaching/managing-up of non-HR staff, which I partly expect if the issues are technical, but I've come across so many incidents of...ineptitude is the only word I can describe it, where fairly high-level managers seem clueless about how to perform basic tasks. Is this a symptom of people moving very early after graduating with a degree straight into middle-management without really understanding the work environment, i.e., not having the opportunity to start at the bottom and learn the ropes properly? I hasten to say though that this is not meant as a sweeping generalisation, it's not always the case, but very much depends on the person. It seems crazy when there are is so much training and support available these days. What I also notice though is that some managers are almost not allowed to manage - there's a lot of micro-managing by very high-level staff, so effectively dumbing down lower-levels of management, or over-inflating what will actually be expected of them.

There does also seem a terrible culture now for constantly talking about things (this is endemic), constantly strategizing, but not always doing anything. The word 'strategy' should be banned (!) - I hear it so often in my work place, but I don't think people really understand what it is, other than it sounds important so we must to do it. A lot of us just roll our eyes when we hear it and head for the hills before getting drawn in.

Interestingly, the curriculum for law degrees in the UK has radically changed in the past few years after an in depth review of feedback from universities by the Bar Standards Board and Solicitors Regulatory Authority. I understand the review was done because the legal profession was finding new graduates were often simply not able to adjust well to the working environment, which hadn't necessarily been an issue in years gone by. Some of our modules are now workshop based so that students have to work with each other much more. We've also noticed a significant drop in attendance, some inability to concentrate with the traditional hour-long lectures, so changes have been made in how we teach - more 'bite-size'. The BSB/SRA review led to other changes as well, such as the EU Law module becoming optional rather than mandatory after Brexit, so there were market/legal factors as well.

But I sometimes wonder when, why, how this inability to manage happened? Is it to do with how children are brought up, how they're taught in schools, society...?