Where should you put your leadership development resources?
If you want to get the most profitability bang for your development buck, where should you put your money? I nominate frontline supervisors. As a group they have more to do with the engagement and performance of workers than any other group.
In his excellent book, Good Boss, Bad Boss, Bob Sutton reviewed the research on the impact of a person’s immediate boss on their productivity and engagement. Here’s how he summed it all up.
“The upshot of these and so many other studies and stories is that bosses pack a wallop, especially on their direct reports. Bosses shape how people spend their days and whether they experience joy or despair, perform well or badly, or are healthy or sick.”
It just makes sense that a big chunk, maybe even the biggest chunk, of learning and skill development resources should be lavished on the largest group of bosses, frontline supervisors. But that’s not what’s happening.
Where do you actually put your leadership development resources?
McKinsey & Company surveyed companies around the world about where they put their learning and development resources. Here’s their summary based on the responses of over one thousand organizations.
“Thirty-three percent of respondents now rank frontline employees first as the group with the most resources for learning and skill development (up from 22 percent in 2010), followed by senior and executive leaders as a spending priority.”
Frontline supervisors? Those bosses that we know have a major impact on performance are at the bottom of the heap. Top management spends 26 percent of learning and development resources on themselves. All the frontline supervisors get a paltry 7 percent.
That’s just stupid.
