This column is excerpted from David Maister's new book: Strategy and the Fat Smoker (published by The Spangle Press in January). Business, as a subject, is about things of the logical, rational, analytical mind: concepts such as "the value chain" or the numerous P's of marketing. Even when it's analyzing and discussing people, business is often treated as an intellectual process of analysis and discussion: advanced financial analysis, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the characteristics of great leaders, etc. Business, at least as it is taught in our business schools and most in-house training programs, is about understanding and knowledge.
Both of these are, of course, very important. However, managing is a skill, and (as it transpires) has nothing to do with rationality, logic or intelligence. Whether you can manage is a simple question of whether or not you can influence individuals or organizations to accomplish something. It's about influencing people: singly, in groups or in hordes.
No amount of understanding, knowledge or intelligence will help if you are unable to interact with people and get the response you desire. Consider the topics of marketing, cross selling, building client relationships, earning trust and providing client service. Many firms provide training programs and other forms of development on these topics as if the key problem is one of logic, analytics or understanding. However, as argued in part two of this book, the essential keys to success in winning business has little to do with rationality and everything to do with an ability to interact well with other people.
Becoming good at dealing with people (inside or outside the organization) is not accomplished by taking a college course in psychology, sociology, anthropology, or any other "-ology" where people sit around and intellectualize about "human resources" or "market segmentation" but never have to actually deal with a real, live human being.
If, however, we really want to help people develop skills, we must view "training" the way an exercise instructor would use that word—designing a planned set of activities that engage the right "muscles" and slowly build them up through the experience of doing.
Most firms go about training entirely the wrong way. They decide what they wish their people were good at, allocate a budget to a training director and ask that training director to come up with a good program. Training is too often used as a (personally) inexpensive way to look like you're doing something if you're a manager.
Bringing about change is immensely difficult and complex. Before designing any change program, it is necessary for managers to address questions in four key areas:
- Systems: Does the company actually monitor, encourage and reward this (new) behavior?
- Attitude: Do people want to do this? Do they buy into its importance?
- Knowledge: Do they know how to do it?
- Skills: Are they any good at implementing and executing what they know?
The importance of the attitude questions is often underestimated. It is management's job to make people want to learn things by managing the "why"—helping them understand why this is important, why it is exciting and fulfilling, and why people should sacrifice their time and attention to get involved.
If you can be convincing on the why, the training itself can often be trivially easy. When people understand and "own" the importance of a topic, recognize its purpose, meaning and value, and its role in their own careers, they often seek out (and find) the books, the videos, the online materials and the college courses, without the company needing to provide them.
In fact, when I conduct training sessions, that's what I focus on. I try, primarily, to get people excited about the topic, so they will leave the session actively seeking out the new learning for themselves. However, this only works if they believe that their company's management also believes this is important, not just that I do!
David Maister is one of the industry's leading authorities on the management of professional services firms. He can be reached at david@davidmaister.com. Please e-mail your story comments to customercare@alm.com.
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