Why Some Managers Don’t Learn And Develop
Being a manager is a complicated job. It requires continuous growth, learning, and development. Dealing with people is not easy, especially being accountable for their performance and results.
It goes without saying that if we are going to be effective managers we need to make continuous and consistent development part of our job role. Unfortunately, that is not the case with every manager.
So, why don’t some managers prioritize continuous and consistent development?
Here are some reasons I can think of.
A focus on qualifications which are not necessarily developmental
We love qualifications because they say something about us. For some of us, they are akin to a title of authority. But having a qualification does not necessarily mean you’ve learned anything relevant to your role. Yes, it may be good for your CV and even instrumental for job applications but it may not make you a better manager. A lot of times when you ask a manager what kind of development they need to support them, the most common answer is geared towards qualifications such as MBAs and Level 7 management qualifications. I’m not discouraging those qualifications but they will not necessarily help you develop effective management skills.
Training courses with no application
Some managers love going on training courses. When they or their team have challenges they ask for training. Sadly, training doesn’t change people, learning does.
Let me explain.
Training is a structured way of delivering information and experiences to people with the hope that they will learn from it. The goal of training is to help people learn but it does not guarantee learning.
Learning on the other hand is the process of taking in information or having an experience (for example from training) and doing something with it. The evidence of real learning is a change in behavior or doing something different. Training only becomes effective when we do something with it otherwise, it’s just mere information that we engage with and then forget. A manager that attends training and does nothing with it won’t develop.
No reflection
It has been said that we learn mostly by what we do. Managers tend to learn more from their day-to-day experiences than anything else. This means we can learn from both positive and negative experiences and we can learn bad habits and keep doing them.
Reflection or reflective practice as some like to call it allows us to sit with our experiences and think about them and hopefully extract some form of learning from our reflections. Through reflective practice, we can become more self-aware and that can help us to honestly assess areas of weaknesses and strengths in our practice.
Managers that reflect are better able to look inward and identify areas where change is needed. They are also better able to make use of information from training courses they attend because they reflect on it.
They don’t read
A lot of managers don’t read. That, I think, is quite sad because reading can expose us to new ways of thinking, diverse experiences, and ideas which we can use and adapt for our own purposes. Some will argue that reading does not help because it’s a passive form of attempting to learn. I disagree. A consistent habit of reading will challenge the way we think about leadership and management and affect the way we respond in how we manage people.
Personally, I think reading is one of the most effective forms of leadership and management development. If you don’t like reading then listen to audiobooks. Not only are books cheap but they are portable too. Twenty minutes of reading daily can make a massive difference to any manager’s thinking.
Resistance to feedback
For any manager, it can be tough to give feedback to people. It’s even tougher asking others for feedback. We are afraid of asking for feedback not only because the feedback might not sound nice to us but also because the feedback may actually be true. And sometimes we don’t want people to tell us the truth.
As tough as feedback may be it can challenge us to reflect on our behavior and make changes for the better. If you are so scared of discovering the real you to the point of avoiding feedback you will miss out on opportunities to learn and grow.
So, these are five reasons why managers may not grow. Do you see yourself in any of them? What other reasons do you know of?
Even though I wrote them I can see one or two areas where I need to improve too.
