May 17 2022

Non-Rotational Advancement Up the Ranks

I’ve written about this before – how some supervisors and managers didn’t have any prior experience with parts of the organization that they were now in charge of.

That’s makes it a challenge to do a good job at:

Planning the work
Assigning the work
Monitoring the work
Troubleshooting the work

So they might tend to hide behind popular quips such as “we hire smart people and don’t tell them what to do; they tell us what to do” and, IMO, other such irresponsible nonsense. And yes – there are occasions when that might be the right way to approach something. But that’s in the minority of cases I would venture.

I’ve been involved with almost 30 Performance Analysis efforts since 1982 targeted at Management levels where we define their responsibilities for Outputs and then determine their tasks, leading to the Enabling Knowledge & Skill requirements.

And in almost every effort I heard from supervisors and managers bold enough (confident enough now) to admit their fears at the start of their new managerial roles.

They often felt lost, trapped in a maze, and over time they demystified their maze, figured out what they knew that was true, untrue and what their knowledge gaps were, and worked to fill in those gaps. It helped when they constructed their own models, mental and physical, of the Work Processes (WorkStreams/WorkFlows) in their areas of responsibility.

Sometimes the people involved my Analysis Processes would pull out diagrams that they had made years earlier to show me how they mapped/diagramed the work of their people.

People can either figure it out on their own – or they can be given the answer – or they can be taught how to define and map their own Processes and Practices.

A Few Books

Back in 1994 my business partners (Ray Svenson & Karen Wallace) and I sat in our conference room with the Analysis Reports for just over 20 managerial analyses we had completed since 1982 – and assembled a model of Management Performance.

That model of Management Performance was used in a book we were wrapping up at the time (my and Karen’s first; Ray’s second), The Quality Roadmap.