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Experience As A Teacher
Consider
management failure in American industry.
Failure rates have been rising for two decades.
In many companies, they are now 25% at the top and the bottom
of the organizational pyramid.
High
failure rates among first-level managers may not be surprising because
it has long been recognized that highly effective individual
contributors often have trouble making the transition from doing to
managing. But high failure rates among top managers are another matter.
These managers were promoted into senior management because
they have the highest potential of all the managers in their
organizations. Yet
failure rates among them are now as high as they are among
inexperienced, first-level managers.
If
experience lets 25% of managers at the top and bottom of the
organization pyramid fail, it would seem there is something wrong with
experience as a teacher. The
question we should be asking ourselves is:
Is experience a teacher whose time has passed?
In
answering that question, we can be reasonably sure of two facts.
First, experience is losing its effectiveness as a teacher.
And second, managers can no longer rely on experience to learn
how to perform their jobs effectively or how to move up the management
ladder.
There
are several reasons why experience is losing it effectiveness as a
teacher. One reason is
that experience has become increasingly handicapped by its three basic
weaknesses. The most
serious of these is that experience tests managers before it teaches
them.
It
lets you burn your hand before it teaches you not to put it on a hot
stove. It lets managers
make mistakes before it teaches them how to avoid them and it lest
more and more of them fail before it teaches them what they need to
know to succeed.
Experience’s
second weakness is that it is a slow, expensive, and risky way to
learn. It takes most
managers years to lean how to perform their jobs effectively.
The reason experience is so slow is that most of the time
managers spend on the job is “non-learning” time.
Managers say they learn something new every day, but if most
managers kept a log of what they learned each day that enabled them to
perform their jobs more effectively, most days would be a total blank.
Experience
is a painfully slow teacher. It
takes new managers from one to three years to learn how to perform
their jobs effectively, and while they are learning, they are bound to
make mistakes. The more
complex their job, the more costly their mistakes are likely to be.
One
study we conducted indicated that even in a relatively small company,
it costs an average of one million dollars a year in lost profits for
a new general manager to
learn by trial and error on the job.
It
is inevitable that more and more organizations are going to conclude
that letting new senior managers learn from experience on the job is
too slow and expensive to be tolerated, particularly since an
increasing number of high-potential managers are failing.
A faster, less expensive and less risky way to develop top
managers clearly must be found.
The
third reason why experience is losing its effectiveness is that it can
only teach managers the lessons they needed to know yesterday.
Experience is yesterday’s teacher.
It is a backward-looking teacher who is unable to teach
managers the lessons they need to know to handle the problems and
opportunities they will face tomorrow.
Experience
cannot keep managers up with the accelerating rate of technological,
economic, social and political change that is occurring around them.
Change is the most important single force reshaping management
jobs in both government and industry.
Tom
Peters of “In Search of
Excellence” fame, warns that in the future every organization must
have “leadership that loves change instead of fighting it."
However,
managers cannot be expected to love change, if they cannot cope with
it--if they cannot manage it. The inability of experience to
teach managers how to cope with change is a major reason why
experience is losing its effectiveness as a teacher.
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