Management Crisis Fuelled By Too Many ‘technical Specialists’

Dec. 11, 2009 - PRLog -- Following the recent CBI report which revealed many employees had little confidence in their managers, Nigel Watson, MD of Q4 Solutions has voiced concerns that the UK’s long history of organisations ducking difficult performance issues and ‘sideways promoting’ instead of performance managing problem staff out of the organisation could be to blame.
He claims that management teams within businesses are now suffering from a hangover of ‘technical specialists’, whose technical competence needed rewarding to entice them to stay. In many cases, the only way to financially reward them was to promote them into a managerial position, which ultimately, they were not trained to do.

“Often a career is seen as a game of snakes and ladders with staff seeing their manager as a snake and likely to set them back in career over time, so the challenge is always to find the nearest ladder to side step them. With hindsight, supporting these managers with a programme of managementleadership development would have been prudent because we are now faced with evidence that staff are increasingly becoming disconnected and disengaged from their organisations, which in a downturn is a dangerous place to be” observes

According to Watson, organisations can pull back the status quo by focusing on innovative ways to manage talent, which includes working towards a performance-led culture, not one of power. Ultimately, Watson says that being honest with staff (management included) and applying a consequence to poor performance is critical to organisation’s medium and long term success.

“A good performance-led culture is one where everyone wants the same performance outcome and takes pride in their results and what is takes to achieve those results. For this to happen, everyone needs to have to want it and be able to see a clear ‘what’s in it for me’. It is not too late to change but what is clear, is that it is no longer possible to manage our way out of this situation incrementally – it requires a wholesale shift in approach and execution to survive,” says Watson.

ENDS

Editor’s Notes

Nigel Watson is one of the most experienced performance culture specialists in Europe. He has been managing director of Q4 for almost a decade and has over 20 years experience in serving corporate household names.

Q4 Solutions delivers programmes of leadership development, workshops, facilitation and coaching. Using acknowledged leaders in their field, Q4 has assembled a formidable array of talent under the overall guidance of Nigel Watson

Nigel’s career has been spent in the people, performance, process arena and he has worked with many prestigious clients, including: Alliance & Leicester, Augusta Westland, BP, BAE Systems, EDS, KPMG, Logica CMG, Selfridges and Vodafone.

Nigel was also part of the company responsible for: training the skippers and crew for the BT Global Challenge Yacht Race, creating a joint civilian leadership school at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, and for working with Sir Clive Woodward in developing the shift in behaviours and performance for the England 2003 Rugby World Cup Squad.
For further information visit www.q4solutions.co.uk

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