For example, Mary works for Widgets International as an apprentice widget assembler. After a year she moves up to journeyman widget assembler. Mary is one of the best widget assemblers in her section. She is fast and accurate and hardly ever has a widget returned for re-work. Every year she receives an increase in pay based on her annual review, but after a few years she reaches the wage cap for her position. She transfers over to widget design, which has a higher pay scale than widget assembler, but after a few years she reaches the wage cap again. What can Mary do to earn a higher wage? Well, there's a team supervisor position open. Mary, on the strength of her excellent record of assembling and designing widgets, is hired for the position. Good for Mary! She's now on the management track! But chances are Mary, within a year, will be viewed by either her subordinates or her superiors, as a bad manager. How could this be? She was the best at all aspects of her job. But supervising or managing other people requires completely different skills than doing the job itself.
New managers who have no aptitude for, or have received no training in, management tend to fail in one of several ways:
Many non-managers view their own managers simply has higher-paid versions of themselves who get to boss people around, or perhaps get certain management perks. They decide that a manager is "good" based on how much time they spend "working", i.e. doing the same thing they did before becoming a manager. New managers often bring this world view with them when they assume their first managerial position. What ends up happening is that the new manager, partly to get on his subordinates' good side and partly because he doesn't know any better, spends all of his time doing things rather than ensuring that things get done. The result is that true managerial responsibilities, such as planning, allocating of resources and employee development, are neglected. The employees likely think that they have a "good" manager, but upper management just sees a highly paid clerk.
Some neophyte managers go the other way. Their opinion of managers was simply people who got to boss other people around, so when they become managers themselves, they make no effort to actually manage, but lord it over their subordinates. Employees generally think that these managers are "bad", since they don't "work". They also tend to take whatever orders they receive from upper management and deliver them to their team without any filter, so the higher ups, at least initially, like them.
This isn't to say that effective managers can't come up through the ranks, or aren't often self-taught. But there are a lot of people out there, who need to earn more, yet do not have management skills, but end up being promoted into management anyway. In the various service and retail industries in which I have been employed I have seen people promoted into management for two main reasons: (1) They were good at the non-management work that they did or (2) They knew how to schmooze the hiring manager. Seldom did a job interview involve questions about leadership qualities or administrative abilities. People frequently applied for positions that they were unqualified for simply because they paid more. I can't say I really blame them. If there are no other avenues for financial advancement, why not roll the dice and try for it? Especially since it could be seen that other non-qualified people had been promoted.
In my retail grocery career, I saw an interesting phenomenon with job applications. At the store level it had a relatively flat organizational chart. There was a store director & assistant store director at the top, department managers running the various sections of the store (sometimes with assistant managers) and clerks below that. In some of the smaller department the managers were doing a lot of the day-to-day work in addition to managing. When a management position opened up, there might be 3-4 applicants, depending on the size of the store, usually clerks who were already working in that department, or an assistant manager in another store. Sometimes there were no applicants. But when an assistant store director or human resources coordinator position was posted it wasn't unusual to see 12-15 applicants, 75% of them with no relevant experience. I thought it might be because no one really knew what the people in either of those positions really did, they thought it didn't involve any real work, and surely it paid a lot!
So what's the solution? There really are two problems: (1) Unqualified people being promoted into management and (2) No path for wage increases outside of management.
Here's a few thoughts:
Create a path for valuable, experienced employees to earn wages comparable to management positions
In some businesses this happens to an extent. When I worked for a newspaper, the unionized pressmen earned wages comparable to sales reps and some managers; pharmacists in grocery stores are often the highest paid employees, including the store director
Be clear regarding what precisely is expected of managers
Hardly anyone knows what managers are supposed to be doing. Making it known what managers do, other than "bossing people around", might motivate some employees to develop real management skills before they become managers
Set up training/education classes for prospective managers
This would be beneficial to any company that wants their managers to do what managers are supposed to do: ensure that things get done.
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