This might be old news to some of you, but Doctors used to be certified for life. Doctors could get their rather substantial education, take their boards and be certified to treat just about anything. But sometime in the 1990’s, that changed. Doctors must now retest every 6 to 10 years.
I don’t know about you but I didn’t know that the Doctor I visited in 1995 might have been certified in 1950 and never had to have been tested on whether he’d/she’d kept up with the latest and greatest info on health and treatment. (Come to think of it – it might just explain the leeches and why he hit me in the mouth with a chicken gizzard for stuttering.)
Recertification for Doctors is a good thing. Most of what a Doctor learns in school is obsolete within 5 years or so. Ensuring our health providers give us the absolute best treatment is just smart.
Managers – Certified for Life
Contrast that with your management team. I’ve gone on the record quite a bit that I believe managers are the real key to business performance. They can make or break a company. A great manager spawns many great managers. A bad manager eliminates future great managers and many times eliminates many great employees as well due to turnover. So, if you believe as I do that Management as a practice and a profession is critical to driving business growth, profit, and performance, why not certify them?
How many of the managers in your company are certified?
Wait… Is there a certification?
Checking the most authoritative source in the world – I Googled it. There are certifications for project management, business process management, weight management (I don’t think that one counts), but I could only find one that focused solely on the practice of management by itself. It is from James Madison University. But check out the course outline – - Planning/Organizing and Leading/Controlling. Those are so 1960’s. Business is changing fast from our industrial age, command and control focus to a much more chaotic, guide and herd focus. We are managing creative people now. Our jobs are more heuristic and less algorithmic – making management a much more difficult and critical part of the success equation. This certification could get you qualified for a job on Mad Men but not in today’s world. It’s just different – and harder.
HR has their certification process and it’s respected and requested. Heck it is almost a requirement for getting any HR job at a larger company. Project managers have certification programs. Accountants have certification programs. But managers – regardless of “function”? No certification.
Managers should be certified.
And over time they should be recertified. I’d even suggest that the higher up in the company you go, the more often you should recertify. Call it a “reality check” to keep those C-level folks from thinking they aren’t responsible for managing people any more.
My Recommendation
Create your own internal management certification process. Require any manager, or would-be manager, to certify and recertify at least every other year. Courses on leadership, motivation, influence, psychology, statistics, software – and MOST importantly – CULTURE. Managers need to be certified so they understand and can recognize behaviors that reinforce the culture.
Our managers need to be as up-to-date as our Doctors are.
Or you just might have a bunch of managers using steak knives as rewards in an incentive program!
Great post Paul but couldn’t you have come up with a worse reward than steak knives? Steak knives are very useful and they always go missing so you never have enough. Erm. Anyway, I agree managers should be certified and re-certified but I also think there’s a deeper issue at work. At most companies they are at least somewhat disincented from developing others who might then go elsewhere, step into their shoes or step above them. So, companies can certify managers all they want and just making the management competency important will do good. However, unless companies also reward managers for developing people, they might get a little better at appearing to listen reflexively but probably won’t set the Thames on fire as great leaders who mentor and inspire others.
You raise an interesting point. Certification for managers would address that issue exactly. There would have to be a whole section on this issue. Additionally, you bring up the point that the company culture has to value those managers who do have people move on and potentially go above them.
I think the fact that we get so many managers that are more worried about their success than their staffs’ points to the fact that we’re promoting the wrong folks.
I like to think of it like I do with my own children. Would I stop them from being more successful than me?
Success in an organization is rarely a zero-sum game. But the company has to support it.
Maybe part of the certification could include a zappos-like buy-out – offer them a bonus to NOT be a manager. Eliminate those that are thinking in the up or out mentality.
It would be a very different world if managers earned less than everyone else…
Liked the write up Paul. As rapid as business changes over time, it would be unrealistic to really have a re-certification from an outside source. Your suggestion of an internal system is a great suggestion on keeping managers up to date. When employees are more up-to-date than who they report to, that’s when turnover happens and there’s problems…
I disagree. Business functions change but people don’t. It should be a simple matter to keep up to date on how to motivate and engage people. If the medical profession can do it surely we can do it in. business
I like the idea, but give it a different name – certification sounds so… B-school (?) As a Waffle House manager, I might prefer to consider myself ‘scattered, smothered and covered’ with leadership skills (after having passed the course). If companies adopted such an approach – oh, how lovely that would be!
I really like your names. That would work so well for that application. Think of the badges! I don’t like the word certification either. How about “qualified”.
Leeches is a problem. However re-certification can easily be used to weed quality people mistakenly…
Managers will never be recertified because they will never be certified. As long as employees are promoted, recognized, and rewarded based on techical, not management skills, there will be no management certification. As long as managers are not measured, evaluated, reviewed, assessed on techical, instead of management, skills, managers will not be certified.
Managers don’t manage and supervisors don’t supervise because all metrics are based on output, production, and technicl skills.
I just watched Seth Priebatsch talk on ‘the game layer’ (what comes after social media)
http://www.ronedmondson.com/2010/08/game-layer-next-phase-after-social-media.html
and he talked about the power of status and ‘leveling up’. For each step completed, you earn experience points. Someone should totally develop a management soft skills training app for the iPad!