I agree! I think this stems from managers who haven’t set specific goals for their teams - or possibly hired the wrong people for the job. If more managers spent time developing their people and quit trying to do the team’s work, we’d all be in a better place, right?

Welcome to the conversation!

I agree with your perspective. So many companies are working, measuring, wondering with the interesting work - and yet don’t get the true results they say they want.

It is amazing the amount of resources, internal and external, expended on doing just about everything BUT the basics. I guess that is why consulting firms exist! There must be some ‘human nature’ work in there somewhere…makes me think of Ram Charan and his approach to leadership.

Many organizations engage in the “interesting work” in the more or less specific hope that they will have stumbled into a magic formula that accomplishes the foundational work for them.

But not only do many of the more glamorous training programs companies flee to today merely facilitate and enhance already present basic competence, a lot of them are rendered superfluous by that competence.

The assumption you refer to is often poorly or mistakenly made - even wilfully so. The fact that we evidently need a major consultancy to inform us of this - or that a major consultancy found it necessary to explore the question - doesn’t speak well for much of the management community.

On the other hand, the results of the survey do. I wonder how many of those who produced the survey’s headline recommendations invest much of their time and effort in tangentially meaningful training programs.