Accidental line managers. Discuss...

My experience is that what many workplaces are calling 'Line Managers' could probably be more accurately defined as 'Team Leaders,' e.g., they are highly experienced with what the team are doing and help with day-to-day tasks, they probably take escalations etc., but they're less confident with delegating, strategic thinking, scheduling and people stuff.

Ah, the "people stuff". Yep. The actual 'managing'.

Exactly!

I have a long-term philosophical disagreement with my colleagues in L&D (which has stretched across my last four employers) as to the difference between "management" and "leadership".

To my mind, "management" is relatively simple. It describes the tasks a person must perform in order to ensure that those placed subordinate to them are provided the resources they need to do their job. These tasks are not difficult and include things such as signing off holiday requests, approving expenses, tracking sickness absence, undertaking risk assessments...

They aren't difficult, but they are time consuming when you're unfamiliar with the processes. But most people of basic competence can do "management" if they are given the tools they need, such as procedural documents and guides to the tasks of management.

Management is an eminently learnable skill.

I wrote in another thread recently that companies seem to have shifted over the last three decades away from investing in management skills because business leaders in FTSE500 companies and their ilk are focused on outcomes other than the simply maximisation of profits. Given Steve's prompt here, I would go so far as to say that companies have increasingly emphasized leadership over management to the general detriment of their employees.

As a graduate of the Royal Military Academy, I was relentlessly drilled in the Army's distinction between the two: that leadership is the ability to command moral authority under pressure and to use that authority to pull or push group members towards the accomplishment of a task that, without the leader, they would not pursue. When facing oncoming fire this is, as you can imagine, a valuable skill in the pursuit of military objectives.

But away from such binary dichotomies, in the world of business, leadership can be as much a force for destruction as creation. Leaders will persuade staff to sacrifice their personal lives, to give up remote working, to deliver unpaid overtime, to ignore their holiday rights, to work through sickness... all in pursuit of goals that are, at best, nebulous and, at worst, in the interests of stakeholders that do not include the wellbeing of the workers.

It is in this world that HR ends up being the substitute manager who - as much in thrall to the leader as anyone else - takes on the tasks of management in support of the leader-who-will-not-manage. And that assumes that you have a leader who is actually able to lead and inspire. But if the culture of the company prioritises leadership without actually training for leadership (leadership is also a learnable skill, albeit nothing like as easy as management), you end up with people who are either neither leaders nor managers or, worst of all, who *think* they are leaders-who-will-not-manage but who are in fact sociopaths-who-will-not-manage.

The thing is management is always useful, but leadership is really only useful in a crisis. Staff are much more interested in knowing if the roster has been updated, if their holiday has been approved or whether they can swift shifts so they can go home early on Friday - which is all management. Leadership only matters when suddenly you're three staff down with a tight deadline and the server just crashed. But if you have a leader-who-will-not-manage, they are motivated to create or seek out crises where their skills are useful in order to conceal their failure to deliver the management for which they are actually paid.

Meanwhile (in this rambling monologue) we should address one of my favourite topics: the Peter Principle.

The promotion of good people to their point of incompetence is an axiom of management development. But it has been treated as a self-fulfilling prophecy when, in fact, it was really just a rallying call for better investment in management training. There is no reason to believe that good people will inevitably become incompetent if their employer continually invests in their development in skills that are - and I cannot emphasize this enough - *not difficult to acquire*.

Thank you Steve for directing me here.

So I think there are a 2 points here;

• Accidental Line Managers

There are only 2 fair ways to go up the ladder in my opinion, job enlargement and job enrichment. If an employee ends up becoming a line manager, without going through these 2 ways, in my experience that line manager is almost always an accidental line manager who doesn't the necessary KSA to be effective. There is a lack of effective and simple career frameworks in most organizations, which further adds to this. Additionally, in my opinion there needs to be a balance between simplicity and complexity, change is not always good, I think many people just want to add unnecessary value to work that doesn't require further value, in the words of Alanis Morrisette, it's like ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife.     

• The opinion that HR is not a substitute line manager or shouldn't be.  

I agree, but sometimes HR needs to take the role on, and needs to teach the line manager how to fish, and for some this could be sowing them how to fish first, while others may just need to be given some guidelines. HR must know the business inside out, including the bottom line figures if HR wants to be as effective as possible. Big and successful organizations like P&G, Unilever and Google, have HR Business Partners for a reason and there is a reason why they have little to no accidental line managers. 

Just my thoughts  

HR needs to take the role on, and needs to teach the line manager how to fish

New metaphor has dropped! <3

I completely agree and sometimes think organisations are very vague about what they expect managers to do. I'm currently revamping the job description templates in my organisation (as we are small, we don't need many) and in the management one I'm being explicit about the typical management tasks and the skills needed to do them. Some managers set rotas, or spend time checking or signing off others' work quality, some managers set strategy, most manage budgets and changes. These all need different skills and, in some cases, training. Too often a one liner "experience in management" is all that is stated and then poorly explored through selection techniques.
Equally, I've know many organisations "promote" technical specialists to managers without giving them adequate clarity, support, training and guidance on what they were now supposed to do.

Gemma said:

I've know many organisations "promote" technical specialists to managers without giving them adequate clarity, support, training and guidance on what they were now supposed to do.

I've seen that a lot, too.

"oh, by the way... you line manage four people, etc."

I've know many organisations "promote" technical specialists to managers without giving them adequate clarity, support, training and guidance on what they were now supposed to do

q.v. The Peter Principle