Professionalising management – Interview with Ann Francke
This month we spoke with Ann Francke, Chief Executive Officer of the Chartered Management Institute and author of the Financial Times Guide to Management: How to Make a Difference and Get Results.
“Great management makes a huge difference. At the Chartered Management Institute we create better led and managed organisations and through creating more qualified managers, treating management as a true profession. We’ve been doing it for sixty-six years and it’s something we are very proud of.”
So often we see managers promoted into leadership roles, responsible for people, resources, departments where they’ve received no training. They may be great functionally, they may be great accountants or IT people or sales professionals but, someone taps them on the shoulder and says, “Congrats, you are now running things. Good luck with that,”
and leaves them to muddle through.” But research shows that poor management makes a big impact: employees are unproductive, unhappy at work, they don’t deliver for the organisation and are stressed.
Professionalising management is key to increasing productivity. Ann Francke adds: “If you were going to the dentist and there were five dentists: four who were untrained and one was trained. You would go to the trained dentist, right? You wouldn’t go to the untrained dentist.”
Ann credits her interest in leadership to great early development “After doing an MBA, I started my management career at Procter and Gamble, who believed very strongly in training people in management and leadership alongside functional training in business. You were always evaluated on how well you achieved your tasks, the objective goals of the business and how well you coached and led and managed your people. They were equally weighted and very early on you were given people responsibilities.
Eventually she became a global general manager at P&G, then European vice president at Mars, and British Standards Institution’s Global Managing Director before joining the CMI; roles which included leading up to ten thousand people across Europe.
Her key message is that good management and leadership is a skill, which can be taught and should be taught from day one.
In the UK only 1 in 4 employers train their managers, and quality of leadership is a factor identified by the OECD as the key driver of the productivity gap in the UK. In today’s knowledge economy people are 62% of balance sheet. The benefits for people that see how important great management and leadership is at every level are phenomenal. There are real benefits, not just commercial but also personal psychological and social.
According to the CMI’s Management 2020 report, well-led organisations focus on people, purpose and potential; an approach that brings crucial business benefits: their financial results improve, they create much better cultures and de-risk decision making.
You can benchmark your organisation versus many thousand responses at: http://www.managers.org.uk/management-2020.
Find out more about the importance of well-led organisations and professional leaders and managers in the interview above!
CMI is the only chartered professional body in the United Kingdom, dedicated to promoting the highest standards in management and leadership excellence. CMI is a specialist Awarding Organisation that offers a wide range of qualifications in Management and Leadership and Coaching and Mentoring.
Coaching is a core leadership skill, which time and again has been shown to increase managerial and organisation effectiveness. View the webinar and learn the key skills of Coaching for Success: Click Here For Instant Access
