Podcasts
Leading Millennials
Sam Shriver, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer at The Center for Leadership Studies, talks with Jeff Chambers about leading the …
It seems like for the longest time the answer to the question “Should I become a manager?” was a bit of a no-brainer. Absolutely you should become a manager! That jump came with greater authority, higher pay, increased influence and was a clear indication your career was headed in the right direction.
Today, that decision appears to be anything but a “no-brainer.”
Across industries and around the world, organizations are discovering that many high-performing frontline employees are declining promotions into management. As a matter of fact, momentum seems to be moving in the opposite direction as increasing numbers of managers are electing to return to roles as individual contributors.
This raises a different question altogether: Is a career of leading and managing people still worth it?
Like their predecessors, managers today continue to be responsible for the following:
But in addition, managers today undeniably face a unique set of ever-increasing responsibilities:
Suffice to say, the scope of leadership in general and management in particular has expanded dramatically. The role has become broader, more emotionally demanding and significantly more complex.
It’s never simple, but for our purposes here, let’s try to make it that way! In years gone by, the active pool of management candidates typically asked questions like these when presented with the opportunity to move into management:
Current management candidates are asking decidedly different questions:
These questions are by no means signs of reduced ambition. They simply reflect a very real need for an organizational shift in the design and positioning of a career in management. Becoming a manager in this day and age is much more of a calling than it is a job. Reflect on the brilliance of Hubert Joly during his tenure at Best Buy for inspiration. When he took the reins as CEO, he commissioned his C-suite and management hierarchy to join him in a campaign to ask every employee the following question:
He subsequently defined the role of management at Best Buy to be one that assisted those employees to make those dreams come true. Very different! And also, very successful at Best Buy!
Managers who can make dreams come true have the following skill sets:
Recruitment of those managers entails reframing the traditional value proposition of the role. Management is a vocation that offers:
When these elements are present, leadership becomes something worth pursuing, as opposed to something to avoid.
As work becomes increasingly shaped by automation, demographic shifts and continuous change, organizations will compete not only for talent but also for capable leaders. The companies that succeed will be those that reframe perceptions of leadership and redesign the role of the manager.
They will reduce unnecessary administrative burdens through technology, invest deeply in leadership development, empower managers with real decision-making authority and recognize that leading people requires commitment, skill and significant support.
Most importantly, they will make leadership a role people aspire to, not one they reluctantly accept. So, the question really isn’t whether leadership has value. The better question is whether organizations are creating management roles worthy of the people they hope will fill them.
