Presented here for discussion is a summary of a current article published with permission from Knowledge@Wharton, the online research and business analysis journal of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Managing requires setting aside doing the work of the firm in favor of empowering others to do the work. But can anyone, with enough desire and proper training, become a manager?
The easiest approach, and some might say the most meritocratic, is to give the management role to the best performer in the role below — a management theory popularly known as the Peter Principle. "The problem is that ... the competitiveness to win that often makes [an individual] the best performer is directly at odds with the requirements of managing other people and trying to get them to succeed," Peter Cappelli, Wharton management professor and director of Wharton's Center for Human Resources, points out. "As in sports, where a lot of our lessons for business seem to come from, the best individual performers don't necessarily make the best coaches."
Among other capabilities needed to make a good manager, Michael Useem, Wharton management professor and director of Wharton's Center for Leadership and Change Management, lists "a willingness to work with ambiguity, uncertainty and unpredictability. If you want everything to be at right angles, that's probably not the mindset you want if you plan to work through others."
Virginia J. Vanderslice, president of Praxis Consulting and an adjunct faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania's Organizational Dynamics program, believes leadership can be learned, but a person needs to have "a personal, deep level of self confidence." She adds, "And by that I don't mean, 'Hey, I can beat my chest because I'm so good.' I mean real self-confidence — a deep sense of personal security. If someone doesn't have that, they are not going to be invested in others because they are too worried about themselves."
Mr. Cappelli believes that, while people can learn to be good managers, they have to be predisposed to working with and through others. He adds, "If we don't do training — and business is much less inclined to do so these days — and we appoint the best individual performers, we are bound to have problems."