A Letter to Patrick Dunne Upon his Memorable Post About Accidental Managers

A Chair takes note of how employees are doing! Isn’t that the job of executives?

Thankfully, that view will eventually subside, as culture is more and more noticed as something that impacts business outcomes.

The downside? Everyone now is an expert on culture ??

Few take the ideas into their hands with such great stewardship, Patrick!

You even created a word that educators like me shall wish we’d come up with ourselves! “Talent refreshment?” I love that!!!

Thank you for your informative post, and particularly also your commentary, analysis and emotional colour which makes it such fun to read.

(In case you have missed it, here Patrick Dunne's post: https://linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6983573427894767616/ )

Since 2013, I have been pushing the argument that employee engagement should be on the scorecard of boards of directors.

I delighted when Dr Tracy Long told us during one of the open board of director retreats that I convened in 2014 that culture was the new frontier for boards to improve on. Audit and even strategy having become a lot better since she first pioneered the board review industry.

I have been visualizing, in my own head, a day when boards would know their employee Net Promoter Score – every day, just as they check the weather before going skiing, or the share price.

This was one of the highlights from your writing that stood out for me, Patrick:

“The?Chartered Management Institute?believes that there are still too many “Accidental Managers”.?Those who have not had the benefit of quality management development. Moreover, although unsurprising in the current context, too many organisations have a?“budget”?rather than?“return on investment”?mindset when it comes to their people and don’t take account of the value created and costs saved in investing in such activity.”

I have been in the adult, executive as well as non-executive education business for 3 decades now.

It’s all cyclical.

Whenever there is a crisis, learning budgets get slashed, people trade down to cheap provisions that can be simplistic rather than based on simplicity, they cut corners by buying short & sweet training modules that give the illusion of self-mastery when the latter is a lifelong endeavour, and people are left to learn on their own.

And so, we get back to trial and error.

With the resulting waste of assets, including financial ones.

With this astonishing lack of quality in decision making and management education outcomes, we are sadly seeing a self induced reduction in our collective intelligence.

We have been challenging the lack of ROI measurement in management education since I was a baby coach. The only company that ever conducted it this consistently was ABB under Percy Barnevik.

I’d love to find out about more…

Why? These are the people who understand our value-based pricing models, where we set KPIs for coaching and focus on outcomes, not (billing for) coaching hours, i.e. input-based measures of the learning equation.

And don’t get me going on everyone now being a coach…

You find tutors, mentors, trainers, educators, retired managers, retired chairmen playing in a field without even so much as an understanding of the learning styles of their coachees. Focused entirely on sharing their experience. Which, if we are lucky helps us with the future. But if we are not…

We would have a lot fewer accidental managers if leaders would complete a proper coaching course, for starters. Then, they could coach their own people on the job!

Here's another highlight from your post, Patrick, that I absolutely loved reading (thrice):

“Sometimes transmitting nice warm familial pitches when recruiting but operating in a jarring transactional way once people have signed up.?On other occasions they get disappointed when they discover that staff appear to have no loyalty to them when their recruitment communications and processes lack humanity and convey an obviously transactional culture and a precarious nature of employment. This is back to the Board and culture and being clear what sort of organisation you want to be and ensuring that’s what you are in practice.”

Can you tell your fellow chairs to do the same for new board members, and give them a proper Onboarding experience?

See, I have been nominated to quite a few boards over the last 15 years, and have already turned down 6 out of 7 opportunities to look good and be taken seriously, by some.

Why?

One Chairman said that he needed a woman, and I would do.

I am dead serious.

I detected schizoid markers, and one in the family was enough, I decided. I had paid my dues on that score.

(He got his woman, you might be glad to know!)

One CEO asked me out of desperation to join their board because she knew that I have board-level mediation skills and she needed to calm the noise in her board.

My Onboarding?

“You’re not going to ask any questions during the meeting, right, Claudia?”

I resigned the next day.

That was before I had even heard about the need for doing a “due diligence” before joining any board. To see if they are right.

Right for me.

I thank Virginie Verdon for opening my eyes. I was in mid programme at her Swiss Start Up Board member Academy when I realized my ignorance.

And I had been ever so proud to tell my peers at Virginie's start up board member programme at EPFL that I had been nominated!

Ego.

Tricky animal. I love that ancient Egyptians depict it as a lion to be tamed. It lay quietly at my feet on the day of my resignation.

My mistake? I had been seduced by the fact that a Hewlett Packard retiree was on that board. And HP was my first corporate love. They inducted me into Palo Alto living in the Nineties and I still bleed blue after all this time.

Nostalgia makes one irrational, I realized, as if I didn't know that already, studied psychopathologist that I am, since my first career.

Here's my last highlight, Patrick, from your post:

“The work?ESSA-Education Sub Saharan Africa?has been doing with artificial intelligence business?Quilt.AI?to understand?What African students think of the transition from study to work??and the world of employment has been really illuminating to employers who can be shocked how well intentioned signals can be received so differently.”

As a white passing diasporic descendent of an African-Brazilian mother, this touches me deeply. That you talk to us not as a basket case, or in need of help. That you simply look us in the eyes, recognize our intelligence and get on with the business of trading with us. Fairly. And that includes mentoring start ups, whether they be in Shoreditch or Luanda.

Thank you.