When I got back from the party, I did a little search to see if I remembered the article correctly. Sure enough, I found an article from September 2014 by Nicole Torres titled “Most People Don’t Want to Be Managers.” She refers to a CareerBuilder survey of more than three thousand full time workers. Here’s a key point.
“Most American workers aren’t interested in becoming managers. At least, that’s what a new CareerBuilder survey seems to suggest. Of the thousands surveyed, only about one-third of workers (34%) said they aspire to leadership positions – and just 7% strive for C-level management”
Leadership development? No, thank you.
I spoke with several people at the party who were in their mid-twenties to mid-thirties. Not one of them had wanted to become a manager or a leader or a boss. One didn’t want to talk to people about poor performance or fire people. Another was in sales and really liked what he was doing. A third had tried being a team leader, but discovered that she hated being interrupted by other people all day long.
Leadership development should be for people who want to be leaders
Here’s the thing. Every one of those people who didn’t want to become a leader had a good reason. It put the statistic mentioned in Nicole Torres’ article in a whole new light.
Instead of thinking, “Oh my, whatever shall we do without enough leaders? We must press some into service quickly!” I was thinking, “Hmmm, maybe the challenge is to find people who like helping others succeed and then help them develop the right skills.”
So, here’s my suggestion. Let’s just put our resources behind developing leaders who want the job and are likely to succeed at it. After all, do we really want to develop unwilling conscripts into lousy leaders?
