How do we develop managers in HE Professional Services now?

Can we all just agree that PS managers are like the grease that keeps the institutional wheels turning?

Institutional leaders rely on them to translate strategy into action, handle staff issues, stabilise teams in times of uncertainty and, in many cases, still handle a significant volume of their own objectives and deliverables. If an institution is going to be successful, it needs good managers.

And yet investment in learning and development is dwindling, pressure on outcomes is high, teams are short staffed, complexity is increasing and there's a complete dearth of even basic management training or support in some institutions beyond policy-led compliance training.

From my vantage point as a coach, even when I'm working with relatively senior leaders, there is almost always some component of their current workplace challenge that's actually a people management issue. They might be struggling to delegate, reluctant to hold a boundary, stuck in a looping conversation with someone about their performance that never actually improves anything, or doing work themselves because addressing the fact that someone else isn't doing it feels harder. Sometimes they know perfectly well that something isn't working but can't quite bring themselves to do the thing that might actually change it.

And I'm increasingly convinced that the way we think about management development doesn't really address the problem.

Do we actually teach people how to manage?

Most people I speak to, and 50% of voters in a LinkedIn poll I ran in June this year, say there is no basic management training at their institution beyond compliance-led themes like Recruitment and Selection training and mandatory e-learning about EDI. A further 28% said there was some basic training, but not enough.

Even where there is management training, I think we have a tendency to fragment the practice of management into standalone topics. Here's some Recruitment and Selection training. Here's a workshop on giving feedback. Here's the Performance Management Policy. Here's something on managing sickness absence. Here's a difficult conversations workshop.

All of those things can be useful. But where do we actually teach people what it means to manage another person well across the whole lifecycle of that management relationship?

How do you establish the relationship in the first place and make good agreements about responsibilities and ways of working? What are regular 1:1s actually for? How do you delegate well and know what's going on without micromanaging? How do you give useful feedback while things are going well rather than waiting until something has gone wrong? When there is a problem, how do you tell the difference between a skill, will or workload issue? At what point does an informal conversation need to become something more formal? What should you document? When do you involve HR? How do you support someone's development and progression? And how do you manage the end of the relationship well when someone eventually leaves your team?

That's a craft. And I'm not sure we've ever really treated it as one.

For a long time, I think many of us learned that craft by observing the managers around us. We replicated the good practice and acted in opposition to the bad. I certainly did. But that leaves an awful lot to chance, particularly if you've never had the good fortune to work for someone who manages people really well.

Knowing what to do isn't the same as being able to do it

Even if we did a brilliant job of teaching the fundamentals of management, we'd still only have solved part of the problem, because management involves interpersonal risk.

Imagine a manager with a team member who is repeatedly underperforming, making errors, turning up late, whatever the issue might be. They've raised it informally more than once. They've clarified what needs to change, offered support and had another conversation... And another conversation. And another. But they don't progress the issue.

Do they need to understand the performance management process? Absolutely. But that still might not be what's stopping them.

Maybe they're afraid the person will be angry or upset. Maybe they're worried they'll be perceived as unkind or that they'll get it wrong. Maybe, underneath all of that, they're afraid of being disliked.

You can't solve that with a flowchart.

What you can do is help the manager see the situation from a different perspective. While they're trying to preserve their relationship with the person who isn't performing, what's happening to their relationship with everyone else? The rest of the team can see that the problem isn't being addressed. Someone else may be quietly picking up the work. Stakeholders are dealing with the consequences. The manager may be protecting themselves from the risk of losing one person's approval while gradually losing the trust and respect of everyone else affected by the problem.

That perspective shift matters. The fear doesn't necessarily disappear, but the manager can see that avoiding the difficult thing isn't actually the easier option it appeared to be. They have more information about the choice they're making and, as a result, a different action can become possible.

That's management development too.

So what do managers actually need?

The more of this work I do, the more I think good management development needs to address four different things: knowledge, practice, development and conditions.

First, managers need knowledge, but I mean something more substantial by that than giving them a selection of management techniques. They need a coherent understanding of what managing another person actually involves. They need to see the whole job, and within that they need to understand what good practice looks like and how the relevant processes and policies work in their own institution.

We could make that considerably easier than we currently do. In some institutions, the answer to a fairly straightforward management question is distributed across multiple HR policies, procedures and guidance documents. Technically, the information is all there. Practically, a busy manager may need to wade through hundreds of pages of policy wording to work out what they're actually supposed to do next.

This is one area where I think AI could be genuinely useful. Imagine being able to ask a secure institutional AI agent: "I've spoken to someone informally three times about repeated missed deadlines. I've clarified the required standard and offered support but nothing has changed. What should I do next? What do I need to document? Which of our policies apply? At what point should I contact HR?"

I'm not suggesting we let an AI make management decisions. I'm suggesting we use it to help managers navigate the institution's own information so they can make better-informed decisions themselves. 

Having a policy and making that policy findable and usable are not the same thing. Don't even get me started on the fact that the document with the obvious name for whatever the issue is might only pertains to Academic colleagues or Students. The PS version might have a slightly abstract name or only be accessible behind a portal log-in so that anyone trying to access it while on sick leave has to log in to their work accounts.

Second, managers need practice, because management is something you do. You can understand a feedback model perfectly while sitting in a training room and find that all of your carefully chosen words disappear when you're sitting opposite someone who's angry with you or in floods of tears. Managers need opportunities to rehearse, to try things, to get them slightly wrong, to hear themselves saying the words and to work on real situations rather than hypothetical case studies.

Third, they need development. This is the layer underneath the behaviour. Why aren't I delegating even though I know I should? Why have I had essentially the same conversation with this person six times? Why do I keep saying yes when I mean no? Why am I doing work that clearly belongs to somebody else? 

There are points in a management career where what made you successful before stops working. Being helpful might have made you an excellent team member, but it can make you an exhausted manager if you can't let other people take responsibility. Being liked might have helped you build brilliant relationships, but it becomes a problem if maintaining someone's approval matters more than addressing their performance. Being the person who always knows the answer might have helped you progress, but it can become a constraint when your job is now to create the conditions for other people to succeed.

I think of these as developmental thresholds. Crossing them isn't simply about acquiring another skill. Sometimes you need to see yourself, your role and the situation differently before a different way of acting becomes available to you.

And finally, managers need the right conditions.

We can't develop managers and keep giving them an impossible job

Great managers spend a decent proportion of their time actively managing and engaging their people. That time has to come from somewhere.

We can't tell managers that people management is important while simultaneously loading them with so many individual objectives and projects that managing their team becomes the thing they squeeze in around their "real work". I've worked with managers who don't think they have time to hold regularly scheduled 1:1s with their team members. So imagine what happens when a performance issue emerges.

They've heard the sector folklore that "it's impossible to get rid of people". They perceive formal performance management as something that will take months, involve mountains of paperwork and require a huge amount of their already limited time. They're already struggling to find time for basic management activity, so of course another informal conversation can look like the easier option.

And then they have another. And another.

Eventually, the problem that could have been addressed much earlier has become significantly more difficult to resolve. There's a false economy here because the time doesn't disappear. The performance issue still has to be managed somehow. It shows up in missed work, colleagues compensating for someone else's underperformance, frustrated stakeholders, repeated conversations that don't change anything and the manager doing the work themselves because that's quicker. Sometimes it eventually shows up as a grievance or dispute, at which point everybody has to find time for it because the problem has become impossible to ignore.

HR teams are dealing with the downstream consequences too. They're handling grievances, disputes, formal casework and relationships that have deteriorated considerably before anybody asks for help. So I think there's an important question here about how much organisational capacity we could save if managers were better equipped and supported to deal with problems while they were still small.

Good management is preventative work. It's the regular 1:1, the clear agreement, the early feedback and the slightly uncomfortable conversation now instead of the enormous conversation six months from now.

If we genuinely want managers to do that work, we have to create the conditions for them to do it. They need realistic workloads, usable processes, an accurate understanding of what those processes actually require rather than relying on institutional folklore about how impossible they are, and appropriate access to HR support. Their own managers also need to treat management as a meaningful part of their role, rather than an administrative inconvenience attached to their actual job.

So what have we tried?

Back in the day there used to be local departmental budgets available to spend on professional development for team members, including managers. But there wasn't always much on offer beyond specialist skills training.

In my own experience as a local L&D budget holder in a Directorate of around 90 people, managers didn't necessarily know what development to ask for beyond "management and leadership skills". That didn't really wash with our Director, who wanted more specificity in requests. But there's a chicken and egg problem there. How do you identify the development you need if nobody has ever given you a coherent picture of the job you're trying to develop in?

Then came Apprenticeships. I've coached a decent number of people over the last few years who have participated in Management and Leadership Apprenticeships, including the one that can lead to an MBA if you meet all of the certification requirements.

The intended model includes one day per week of protected time for learning. The reality described to me by the people I've coached has often been rather different. They haven't felt able to simply drop to four days of normal work each week, because their already overextended teams haven't magically acquired another day's capacity. So study and coursework get squeezed in around work and family life instead.

Several have ended up in front of me because they're stressed, trying to juggle everything and wondering whether coaching can help with the confidence issue that partly took them towards the apprenticeship route in the first place. I'm not suggesting that's everyone's experience, but I've heard variations of it often enough to think it's worth paying attention to.

There are also the big sector leadership programmes like Aurora, and I definitely think there's a place for that type of programme. But leadership development and management development aren't quite the same thing. (It also concerns me that these programmes are mainly marketed exclusively to women but that's a rant for another day.)

There is something much more everyday and practical that we're in danger of neglecting if we only focus on developing leadership. The questions managers hold in their heads like: How do I delegate this piece of work properly? How do I tell someone their performance isn't good enough? How do I stop having the same conversation? How do I say no? How do I know when this needs to become a formal issue? How do I manage people well when I'm tired, under pressure and slightly afraid of what will happen if I do?

Those questions deserve serious developmental attention too.

What can we actually do about it?

Coaching for all! ...I would love that. I'm also acutely aware that it's completely impractical to implement, not to mention expensive.

But I do think there are viable alternatives. Let's do really good quality basic management development that gives people a coherent understanding of the craft rather than another collection of standalone workshops. Let's make institutional knowledge much easier to access at the point managers actually need it. Let's give managers opportunities to practise. And let's create spaces where they can think about the real situations they're dealing with, including the uncomfortable human stuff underneath them.

I'm particularly interested in coaching-style approaches at scale for this reason. Action Learning Sets can give participants some of the benefits of coaching-style interventions without the much larger investment required to provide everyone with 1:1 coaching. Participants work together on real-life problems from their actual work contexts, practise coaching questions, active listening and facilitation skills, hear how other managers are approaching similar problems and get to examine their own thinking rather than simply being told what to do.

It's experiential. And because you can work at around a 1:8 facilitator-to-participant ratio, it's intimate enough for people to share their real struggles while being large enough to keep costs relatively low.

I'm the Programme Director of SEAL, a consortium-based Action Learning programme run with eight HEIs in London and the South East. Rather than spending around £1,500 per person for a leadership programme, or upwards of £2,400 for an equivalent-length 1:1 coaching engagement, the consortium approach allows us to bring the investment down to closer to £600 per institution. They get eight places each, which works out at around £75 per person.

With all the sector conversations about efficiency and collaboration, I think this is a great example of what collaborative working across peer institutions can make possible. SEAL itself was originally based on a similar consortium project operating in North West England. (I don't know if it's still running). I'd love to see more of this kind of thinking around the sector.

I don't think the answer to the current management development problem can simply be "more training".

Managers need to understand the craft of management as a whole. They need accessible information at the point they need it and opportunities to practise what they've learned. They need spaces where they can examine what gets in the way when they know what they should do but still find themselves avoiding it. And they need working conditions that make good management possible in the first place.

If we want excellent institutions, we need excellent managers. Perhaps it's time we got much more serious about how we actually develop them.