
27 Jan How do you learn to manage?
South African state-owned entities are inspirational case studies in management. Most of the state-owned entities have all the ingredients for success – a clear purpose, a reliable income stream, a captive customer base, and relatively unlimited access to labour (given South Africa’s unemployment rate).
Adding decent management delivers breathtaking results – performance turnarounds can be achieved in a short space of time. If you are paying attention to good news stories, what seems like outliers pop up all over the place – a school that has achieved tremendous results in recent times after years of poor performance, a suburb that is suddenly clean, with road maintenance taking place, and traffic lights that seem to miraculously work again.
The same thing happens to private companies when attentive and careful management replaces bad management practices. Customers appreciate the service improvements and reward the company with better income. We have all seen what happens to a restaurant, for example, when a good restaurant manager steps in. The restaurant is cleaner, waiting staff are attentive, food is delivered quickly and tastes great.
Something happens to put labour to work in a way that achieves a decent standard of delivery. These are almost always a case study in decent management – somewhere in the story you discover that someone took over the management of the entity, and within a relatively short space of time things get better.
The traditional model of management includes (but is not limited to) leadership, focussing on planning, organising, leading and controlling what is happening in the organisation. Where do magnificent managers come from?
Management is a practice, learned by doing, improved in context with other managers – in discussion, in sharing stories, in peer coaching where the peers are people from the same organisation ideally. Management cannot be learned by sending one person to a business school.
“It has been said that you should never send a changed person back to an unchanged organization. In management development programs, we always do. That is because we disconnect the learner from the natural context of his or her learning, namely the workplace back home.”[i]
That is not to say that business schools have no value – they play an important part in expanding the scope of strategy and the science of operations, spreading good practice and exploring what is possible. But they can’t help a restaurant manager understand their customer, relate to their staff, cope with their kitchen and control their inventory.
Those aspects of management are built on the job. Our Nine Conversations in Leadership are designed such that each conversation grapples with an aspect of leadership, bringing small groups of leaders (at any level of leadership) together to explore key topics. We need management development to follow the same track, including the leadership aspects without sweeping the rest of the managerial skills under the carpet.
Great management development looks and feels like an organisational development intervention, and is designed to develop the organisation and the manager simultaneously, recognising the management groups as students in the workshop and teachers when they return to their workgroups.
In our first conversation café of 2025, we ask whether leadership development is overcooked. Are organisations over-investing in leadership development at the cost of management development? What is the difference and why should we care? Register here for our January 29th conversation café and kick the year off with a critical look at one of our holy cows in organisation development and change.
[i] Mintzberg, H. From Management Development to Organization Development with IMpact, OD Practitioner (Vol. 43, No. 3, 2011).