Ditch the targets and invest in leadership training plans

With the UK's managers under relentless attack for their ineffectual performance perhaps it's time to recognise that best practice and innovation are not intuitive and that training can make a difference. By Claire Spencer, Head of research, TSO Consulting.

"Management training in Britain is too little, too late, for too few," claimed prolific management guru Charles Handy. But the interesting bit is not that he said it, but when he said it - 1987. Has anything really changed since then?

Sometimes to accept an unpalatable truth we have to hear it from an outsider. I suspect Trade and Industry Secretary Patricia Hewitt knows this and that it is one of the key reasons she hired Professor Michael Porter - one of the world's leading business strategists - to tell the DTI why we lag behind on productivity.

British managers have been under attack in the media as ineffectual and amateurish. We have been told by both Newsnight and Hewitt that the management style of TV's bumbling David Brent is sadly close to the truth. So, as Porter delivered his initial findings, the collective sigh of relief was almost palpable when he appeared to stop short of delivering a harsh verdict on British management.

Instead, Porter highlighted the need for more unique strategies and ways of competing, and called for greater innovation. However, in deriving his data on innovation almost entirely from the UK's contribution to US patent registrations, he may have missed a trick or two.

Business innovation in the UK over the past three to four years has involved more than the meagre levels of research and development to which he alluded, and the failure to invest in creating 'unique value' for British products and services, with continuous cost-cutting setting the economy on a path of diminishing returns.

Innovation is also to be found in the changing styles of business and organisational leadership that are difficult to reflect in the largely quantitative data he referenced. Last year's Council for Excellence in Management and Leadership report to the DTI clearly identified a lack of strategic thinking, communication, leadership, and motivational skills as key factors in the under-performance of British managers.

Thankfully, many organisations in this country have moved from transactional to transformational forms of leadership, and from a top-heavy directional style to more devolved forms of management. This is beginning to counter-balance the kind of static and introspective management Porter described.

But it will take time for the results to filter through to the broader economy. HR professionals still have much to do - of the four million or so managers in the UK, only 20 per cent have management qualifications and around 20 per cent of small firms and 4 per cent of large organisations provide no management training at all.

Our own experience shows that succession planning is a major issue for many organisations, especially at board and senior manager level. Without investment, successors have a long lead-time before peak performance, which can have an adverse impact on their organisation's chances of reaching its true potential.

Non-investment here has a lasting and expensive impact. If the Government is really prepared to 'back off' - in Professor Porter's words - from economic target-setting in favour of a more proactive and dynamic private sector, then considerably more investment will be required in middle management and leadership development.

The acquisition of technical skills and training is all very well, but if few British managers are prepared or equipped to assume responsibility, any investment in R&D and innovation will make very little difference.

We should take Porter's principles on 'clustering' and apply them at the organisational as well as at the community level. Empowering individuals to lead and innovate, even at lower levels of an organisation, need not be a recipe for organisational chaos.

Rather, it would allow best practice to move smoothly up and across an organisation, as well as down.

It would also mean senior management spending fewer hours issuing directives that get lost in the works, and provide a boost to productivity where it really matters.