Helping the accidental manager

An interview with Anthony Painter from Chartered Management Institute

The role of managers are pivotal in our working lives but most managers aren’t trained or prepared for the responsibilities that they are given.

When we look at the research from Gallup about burnout and why people hate their jobs managers are regarded as having the biggest responsibility. Half of people who say they don’t rate their manager say they are looking for jobs. So what can we do to make our relationship with our managers better? I chatted to Anthony Painter from CMI.

Chartered Management Institute research on the Accidental Manager

82% of workers entering management positions have not had any formal management and leadership training
only a quarter of workers (27%) describe their manager as ‘highly effective’
of those workers who do not rate their manager, half (50%) plan to leave their company in the next year

Follow Anthony on LinkedIn

Transcript

Bruce Daisley (00:07.15)

This is Eat Sleep Work Repeat. It’s a podcast about workplace culture, psychology and life. A lot of podcasts have stopped doing the intro. They just boom, drop you in there because they sort of know that you’ve worked out who they are. Anyway, not that here. I want to thank you for the downloads that I had. I had a huge amount of downloads, mainly from, guess, newsletter subscribers in the first instance, but forwarding it on to other people. there were…

There were tens of thousands of downloads of the deck that I did, which was work in 2024, an aggregation of a lot of the research that passes my desk and a lot of the research that I spend my time delving into and reading about. And you can download that deck for free. It’s in the show notes, just the top team themes in it. The themes were that work isn’t a happy place for most. Don’t turn back the clock on flex. celebration of coordinated office time. Trust is the basis of good culture and managers, managers, managers. were the five themes. And it leads us into today’s discussion. Actually today’s discussion is a conversation with Anthony Painter from the CMI. Anthony is the director of policy and external affairs at the CMI. And I saw a piece of work that they’d put out about the accidental manager in November last year. was a piece of work that really explored this interesting phenomenon where a lot of managers find themselves doing the job without being given any training. So by Anthony’s estimation, by the CMI’s estimation, about one in four of the workforce are managers. And yet they find themselves thrown into this job where the vast majority of them, 82 % of them enter management without any formal training at all. Therefore, you know, they’re becoming that.

accidental manager. And it has a direct implication in my trends deck. I talked about the importance of managers and the challenge we’ve got is that to some extent, some of the issues that Britain suffers from from a lack of productivity probably could be directed towards lack of management training, a lack of management development. In fact, almost a third of the low productivity is potentially ascribed to this.

Bruce Daisley (02:27.48)

So really interesting, you’re to really enjoy clicking into the show notes and having a look at some of the conversations here. But the reason why the context of this is so important is because the reason why most of us choose to leave jobs is managers. The reason why we sometimes find our job overwhelming and stressful and toxic is often managers. And addressing these things is really critical. I’ve had a series of conversations with Francis Frye actually, and Francis Frye

If you scroll back through the podcast feed, you’ll see the most recent interview with her a few weeks ago. And Francis Frei is like this, this problem solver. goes into big organizations, tries to solve the culture there and, and tries to get maybe toxic organizational culture onto a better footing. I said to her, tell me what’s the approach, what’s the magic, what’s the secret that you do? And her approach is training managers, which is just such a almost prosaic.

solution, but it gives you an illustration really that management training and teaching people how to deal with other individuals has this real quality, this real value to it. That’s why I wanted to chat to Anthony. Like I say, the Chartered Management Institute are responsible for trying to create networks of managers, of trying to help people feel like they’ve got an expertise. They provide training as we will talk about to thousands.

hundreds of thousands of managers. I think focusing on this challenge and recognizing that if we are going to make work better, if we are going to make workplace culture better, then probably a lot of the responsibility falls on managers. It’s a really critical consideration. So here’s my discussion with Anthony Painter from the CMI.

Anthony, thank you so much for welcoming me in. I wonder if you could kick off by introducing who you are and what you do here.

Anthony Painter (04:25.28)

Yeah, so I’m Anthony Painter. I’m Director of Policy and External Affairs. So I look after the sort of the research that we do, the data and insights around management and the future of work. I look at sort of policy questions. What does that mean for public policy, regional policy, and so on, the wider economy? And then I also manage our external relations as well. you know, CMI is a chartered professional body for management and leadership. That’s our bread and butter. We exist to improve the quality of management and leadership.

Bruce

And what is the CMI? How many people are part of it?

Anthony Painter

So we’ve got about 200,000 members, about 150,000 people at any given time are doing one of our qualifications. That might be the charter manager award. It might be doing a degree course that’s also accredited by us, or it might be a management apprenticeship. So one of the main ways in which we seek to improve the quality of management and leadership is by upskilling the managerial workforce in the UK and beyond.

One of the things that comes up as a perennial challenge of the world of work right now actually is that as we navigate uncertainty and complexity, the job of manager in every capacity has become a lot harder. And so is the organization effectively trying to train and empower those people?

we try to empower them, we try to define what good modern management is in a complex environment as you’re describing. We’ve seen a lot of change in the last few years. In many ways, we haven’t seen enough change because there isn’t a big enough public conversation, it seems to me, about what management is, what it should do, what we should expect of managers and what we should do to support them. So we try and put those things in place, whether it’s giving managers the tools to navigate complex issues in their teams or organization thinking about what management should focus on in a modern service-based economy, whether that’s public services or private services of different types. And we try to ensure that managers have the skills they need to be effective within their organizations.

Bruce

So you and I got in touch after I was charmed by some research you did, I think in November, 2023, which was about the role of managers and how often people find themselves in managerial roles without any training or any step up. So I think this idea of a novice manager, and I was really struck by that. So do want to just fill us in first, what the research actually said?

Anthony Painter

Yeah, so we looked in a whole range of factors. We surveyed about 2,500 workers, 2,000 managers. So it was a big survey. And we wanted to get to the bottom on people’s experience in management, either as managers or people who are managed. Of course, that’s everyone in the workforce pretty much. I mean, the key core stat that we unearthed is that 82 % of managers are accidental managers.

And by that we mean is when you become a manager for the first time, you haven’t had any formal skills or training in how to do the job. I’ve been there. I don’t know whether you’ve been in there in that situation. I got my first managerial job on the basis of my expertise in research and policy, not on the basis of the fact that I had any managerial capability. And my experience as so many was, you know, I just thought I’d be naturally good at it and I wasn’t, you know, I had to learn and, you know, some very, very, very tough lessons.

And actually it would have been far better to have had that grounding, that foundation when I became a manager. But I think that experience is almost anybody that goes into the managerial workforce.

Bruce Daisley (07:56.91)

And how do you help those people then so 82 % of people are going into managerial roles and they’re not getting any sort of preparation for it if you were to Provide support and help and guidance for those people. How do people navigate the world of being a manager these days? What are the challenges that they face?

Anthony Painter

Modern economy is based on people, course, economy is always based on people, but especially in modern service-based technological digital world that we’re now in. How you create value is about the relationships that you have, how you work with others, how you interrelate, the trust that you can generate, the support and development you can give one another. And all of those things come back.

to this role of the manager, whether it’s line manager, project manager in different guises. And so that capability, one managers need to know what it means to be effective, have some core knowledge and practice, if you like. Now, CMI has a sort of set of professional standards, and in the center of that is sort of purpose, it’s ethics and sustainability and inclusivity.

And then as we go out around the standards wheel, it’s about how you interrelate with others, how you develop others. It’s about how you organize processes. Maybe we’ll come on to that and talk about the modern world of work and oppression. Now you’ve talked a lot about emails and meetings and that burden that creates self-management. How do you navigate that and create effective organizations mechanically in many respects? And then it’s about self-management as well. How do you manage your own emotions? How do you manage the tensions that you feel yourself, the trade-offs that you’re faced in any given environment?

So once you’ve got that core knowledge and expertise, it’s about how you apply that in particular settings. And that’s where your sort technical knowledge base, your knowledge of a sector and industry comes in.

Bruce Daisley (09:41.526)

Okay, so you do training for people within different sectors as well or guidance within different sectors

Anthony Painter

Management is a universal set of skills, and it is skills, that you apply in particular contexts. So whether you’re in distribution, retail, tech, professional services, government, public services, the way management is implemented matters in that context. But the fundamental things that you’re doing have similarity across the board. Now, if you were to take me out of my policy research and external affairs role and drop me into managing an IT team,

Well, that would be ridiculous. It just wouldn’t work. You know, I haven’t got the general skills to do that and nor has anybody. So you’ve got to have a grounding in the area, but you’ve also got to have a grounding in what it means to be an effective manager.

Right. And what you’re hearing back from people, because the job of manager is always the one that’s criticized actually. It’s a middle manager. They always take the blame for everything. And actually when you go into an organization, you find that the middle manager is acting as sort of this semi-permeable membrane. They’re getting criticism from below, criticism from above, and actually they do a remarkable job of trying to mitigate often unreasonable demands from…

Workers, unreasonable demands from leaders, and they’re trying to balance it. What are you hearing from people about the role of manager?

Anthony Painter (10:59.758)

I there’s I mean, it sounds like an odd thing to say perhaps, but I think there’s a British aspect to this as well. There’s something culturally specific around, we do have a disdain for the manager and we give them a sort of lack of esteem in culture and politics and policy. You you think about the managers that we always think about, you it is a David Brentz or the rest of it, you can be a bit cliched about this. But nonetheless, we don’t see it as a serious endeavor. And yet, and yet.

About a third of the difference in productivity between the UK and the US is down to management capability.

Give me some more guidance on that. So have you helped to identify that? a third of the productivity gap that we hear about all the time, we hear about the French workers get as much done by Wednesday afternoon as British workers do all week. So when we look at it specifically, lack of management expertise is one of the challenges.

Yeah, and that’s the academic evidence. there is a world management survey that looks at all these factors, and they’ve analyzed different factors between different countries as a whole series of academics. And it constantly comes back down to this question of management. So yes, it is about technology. And yes, it is about organizational development, access to capital, and the type of market that you’ve got. So for example, the US has a big single market.

very competitive and that drives management capability because it’s got big supply chains. You have to be competitive, you have to manage well. But overall, there is a differential. And I think one of the things that drags us down is this sort of cultural attitude you see in politics, you see in the media that the manager is there to be knocked and blamed rather than someone that’s been there to be supported and developed. And that’s critical to national success, whether it’s economics or public services.

Bruce Daisley (12:46.454)

Right. That’s really intriguing. So the job is incredibly hard. Actually, if we leaned into this, there’s a big productivity gains for me. One of the things that really strikes me as well is that the job has become endlessly more complex by the changes that we’ve witnessed in the last four years, that people are working with a degree more autonomy now or degree more control over location, a degree more control over how they’re working. And if

A lot of the management, if it is a layperson role, if it’s an accidental manager, I suspect we fall into a heuristic of thinking, this is how I used to do the job. And so consequently, this big shift in four years might mean that you’ve got a distance between how someone did the job themselves when they were doing the job and how they want to manage others now. How do we navigate that?

Anthony Painter

So what was really interesting in the research that we did on better managers is that the number one thing that both workers and managers thought was important in their role was flexibility. Number one. And almost 50 % of respondents mentioned flexibility. And I think that speaks to the type of change that you’re describing.

I think what we started done and through the pandemic, maybe before it, but it was accelerated by the pandemic, we started to question whether the ways in which we were working were ways which were necessary. And the answer has been a resounding no. Actually, there are more often not better ways of having a working life. Still doing your work, still being productive, still doing a good job, but aligning that to the other things that are going on in your life and your own personal needs as well.

And that’s the thing that’s been disrupted. while everyone went remote, of course, through the lockdowns and a period of time in the pandemic, we’ve gone more back to a hybrid situation where it’s possible to do so. Now, it’s important to generalize. There are lots of industries where it isn’t possible to do so. If you work at a hospital or a distribution warehouse or a retail outlet, it’s not so possible to do so. You have to think about what flexibility looks like in those settings too. But in general, people have gone to a more hybrid existence. And the reason is,

It doesn’t seem to have harmed productivity in any identifiable sense where it’s well managed and that’s a critical factor here. So the accidental manager, the untrained manager, the manager without the skills to adapt will struggle more than a manager that has those skills no matter what change we see in the workplace.

Bruce Daisley

Okay, it’s really intriguing. It’s sort of the 200,000 members that you’ve got, how many managers do you think there are in the UK? It must extend into millions.

Anthony Painter

We think about 25 % of the workforce have management responsibility. That means they’ve either got manager in their job title or they manage or supervise somebody. Yeah, that’s about a quarter of people in the workforce. So in and of itself, it’s a big chunk of people who work in the UK.

Bruce

And you mentioned the thing that we can all relate to, because if you’ve ever been a manager, you always have a sense, if you’re being honest with yourself, of feeling like you’re constantly failing, like you’re doing stuff wrong, that you’re not getting it right. Is that the experience of a lot of people in management roles that they feel like they haven’t got a… They lose that sort of connection, that friendship group, that sense that they can relate to other people. Is the benefit of having a network like yourself that Finally, you’ve got someone that you can talk to and connect with.

Anthony Painter (16:11.982)

I think you’ve touched on one of the key things or the key reasons why people get involved with either a membership body like CMI or get management qualifications of different types, ours or other management qualifications, that it gives them the theory, the knowledge, the tools that they can apply and be measured in applying so they know they’re doing competently. So for example, our chartered manager award.

We, you know, people are observed how they apply the theory within their team, within their organization. And when they do that, they then have more confidence, right? And we can demonstrate there’s more confidence. And actually when people do formal management qualifications, they start to get promoted and pay rises and so on because they are seem to be more capable in.

Bruce

You mentioned awards there. What does excellence look like here? When you see the very best organizations that have sort of systematized this or have made excellence look good, what does it look like?

Anthony Painter

They care about people and not just in sort of their nice and caring, that’s all important. But they know that people, know, they will pursue purpose, they need to be supported, develop and challenge when necessary as well. Being a good manager is not just taking anything, you’ve got to know how to give the right feedback. So you’ll do all those things and you’ll do them early on and you’ll do them consistently and systematically.

Um, you will think about how your organization operates, always look for innovation, creativity, um, improvements. Um, and you will know how to manage your own, uh, emotions and needs. So you don’t burn out for, for example. And at the core of it, you will have a sense of values and purpose that is aligned to your team, that is aligned to your organization. And when you’ve got all those things in place and they’re consistent, um, and, and people actually live and breathe those values authentically, not just performatively, then I think you’ve got something that looks like it.

Bruce Daisley (18:01.07)

It’s interesting that you added that qualification purpose at your team level and at your company level. Because one of the things that really strikes me about purpose, I sometimes want to hear the word purpose, that as much as I can believe that it’s motivating and mobilizing, quite often it’s a little bit off in the distance. It feels not really touchable. I’ve worked in organizations where the purpose is incredibly lofty, but doesn’t really speak to what I’m doing today.

And so it’s interesting that you mentioned purpose at a team level. So is that the job of a manager, a leader to some extent, to produce their own sort of articulation of purpose for something that’s far more micro?

Anthony Painter

Yeah, I think it probably is. And of course it doesn’t work if there is then a sort of massive contradiction between that and what the values of the organization demonstrate culturally on a day in and day out basis. But I think there is something around, there’s an importance to belonging. And you get belonging at work when you feel that you’re part of something you want to be part of. And community is probably a bit a grandiose term to describe it.

But you’re feeling you’re working people who bring different things to the party, might have different perspectives, but you feel you’ve got a common cause there and you feel motivated to do a good job. And when you have that sense of belonging and alignment, then you get that motivation. And what’s really interesting in the data, of course, is we split the data looking at those with effective managers versus those with ineffective managers. Those with effective managers feel more motivated to do a good job. They feel more supported, more developed, more a part of belonging, more likely to recommend the company or the organization to others. you know, that belonging purpose identity is critical alongside good management.

Bruce Daisley (19:45.678)

Is that one of the key metrics? Because obviously, immersed myself in some things like the Gallup Workforce Survey. One of the good things that the Gallup Workforce Survey tells us is that on their definition of engagement, engagement levels are relatively low. And one of the things that they speak to in the analysis of that is they say largely these things are reflections of managers. The vast majority of…

The things that serve to disengage people are that they don’t feel seen, they don’t feel understood, they feel their workload isn’t respected and so consequently they feel burnt out. All of those things they pinpoint on managers. Do you see similar levels of engagement that Gallup see and what are the things that you would look for? So you mentioned along the way there that metric of would you recommend this firm to other people? What are the other quick examples that we might? call out if we wanted to do a degree of self-diagnosis.

Anthony Painter

I think, whether you feel that you’re in a learning environment, that you develop, that you think your organization has a good culture, you’d recommend the organization to others. Those are the sorts of things that if I was to do a sort of, know, look at the sort of the workforce health of an organization and Gallup do this, those are the sorts of things I was looking at. we have an odd conversation around this.

offer. So it’s very similar. The engagement conversation is very similar to the inclusivity and diversity conversation. Suddenly, you focus on these things in and of themselves, and you elevate them and say, this is the important thing to do. But actually, there is much stronger way of looking at this. And actually, the organizations that have the strongest workforce engagement, they are also the most successful organizations. And there’s some McKinsey data on this as well. And the same thing with diversity and inclusion. Those that more inclusive have better outcomes.

Anthony Painter (21:37.39)

Going back to that survey where we looked at effective and ineffective manager and all those sort of those radar points that we talked about, effective managers perform much higher than ineffective manager and all those factors we just talked about. And when I say much higher, I don’t mean sort of 10, 15 percentage points high. I’m just 50 percentage points higher on some of those metrics. It’s 40, 50, 60 % is the difference between having an effective and ineffective manager and whether you feel sort of motivated to work for a organization and so on.

Bruce

One of the things we saw, there was a piece of work by KPMG a couple of months before your work saying that two thirds of British managers believe that we’re going to end up back at the five day office. And I just wondered, all of the things you’ve said to me there haven’t necessarily talked about location or place or configuration. Do you have a perspective of what the best case use of a shared workspace is?

Anthony Painter

Yeah, that’s a good, good question. that sort of two thirds figure probably needs a bit of unpacking. So of course, I guess about 40 % of the workforce basically have to be in place sort of five days a week because they’re working in the shop or a hospital or a school or something of that nature. So you can understand a big chunk. And what that suggests is of the remainder, roughly about say a third 40 % are kind of stuck in the old way of thinking about the world.

And whilst I think it is important to have some time together, whether that’s in sort of regional hubs or in an HQ, because you need to generate those sort of bonds of trust and belonging that we’re talking about. There’s no reason to go back to five days a week in the office, for example. So what does a good shared space look like? I think it’s more about the people than the space. know a lot of people who design offices and how that works and interacts with people.

will say something very differently. And of course, they’re right on some of the science and the metrics. But do you want to be in that place with people to do certain things you couldn’t do without that sort of interpersonal contact? So I think a best designed experience is one that makes those interpersonal contacts important and ingrains that in the culture without then sort of flipping back to the old way of doing things, which very few people felt was the right thing to do.

Bruce Daisley (23:56.622)

As you’re looking forward into 2024 and beyond, what are the things that you would ask people to watch out for? Is the role of middle manager as important as people are saying? And what should organizations do to think about arming those people for the future?

Anthony Painter

I’m going make a big pitch here on this one because I think actually, I think we’ve got a problem with how we think about middle management in the UK. think politically, we pay lip service to it to the extent that it gets any attention at all. Yet, we’ve got an economic model that is clearly not working. As an economy, we haven’t been getting more productive, particularly for a decade and a half or more.

And growth rates have been very low. The cost of living crisis is severe on people and so on. So the current economic model is not working. If we are to get to a new economic model and think about green transition, all those things, and modern industries, and the industries of the future, we need to think about what we need to do to develop our managers across the board in different ways. If we ask for reform public services, because we’ve got a fiscal crisis as well, we need to think about how we get more out of managers in public services by helping and supporting them.

There’s a great example, the way, in the Times recently. Ray Sylvester had an article on high intensity theatres in Guy’s and St. Thomas’s hospital. And basically what they’ve done there is they set up two parallel operating theatres that are basically ready for the surgeon to go from one operating theatre to the next. And they’ve increased productivity by some 40, 50 % or something like that. So we’re going have to think about those things in public services going forward. So we need a bigger conversation about the role of managers. We’ve done a lot of work on public services and where there are better managers, there are much better public service outcomes whether that’s in health, education or local government. So we need to have that conversation and then that broader societal conversation about what we need to face the future then needs to be embedded within the organization. An organization needs to think very seriously around are they training their people, their managers effectively enough to develop and perform in the ways that they need them to do.

Anthony Painter (26:02.104)

They need it as individuals, but organizations need that managerial capability to thrive as well things that we’re witnessing for a lot of people is their lived experience of work is a feeling of overwhelm, of overwhelm because of digital demands on us. And those demands might be meetings, calendar invites, emails, Slack messages. What’s your perspective on where we’re going with that? And is there a contribution that managers can help to mediate those challenges?

I think managers are feeling a sense of organizational burden in too many settings, particularly in large organizations, interestingly. We just did some data looking at how much time managers are spending doing emails, in meetings, and dealing with admin tasks. 28 % of those that we surveyed are spending more than six hours on each of those things, emails, meetings. Exactly. It’s a no sleep culture. So that’s 18 hours a week a day of against an average working week, which is 42 hours, which by the way, six or seven hours more than they’re contracted to do. So we’re looking at about half their working week being in those tasks. At the same time, only 8 % of managers think their workforce is AI ready. So some of the things that we’re talking about, the organizational efficiency and opportunity and so on, workplace is not yet ready. Not ready for AI.

So they’re not ready yet to adopt AI and efficiency, but there needs to be a sort of thinking about how much time are we burning through? have Francis Frei on your program a couple of weeks ago, and quite clearly this is a fair experience across economies and so on. So I think from the perspective of managers, the next year or two, we need to think around how much time we’re wasting, we don’t need to wait, and how much more can we put that to more creative, innovative, productive purposes.

A lot of this feels like job design. We never take a moment to sort of design work. I’m really struck, I just came back from a trip to US. I’m always struck in the US by restaurant servers compared to UK restaurant servers because they appear to be trained. They appear to be a participant in a performance and it’s a bigger tipping culture there. But you know, they come up, they’ve got a very clear agenda to sell you the items on the menu and to up-sell you. And it’s, you know…

Irrespective of what the profile of the server is, they… And you get a lot more restaurant servers in their 50s and 60s than you do. Like, it’s really interesting. Interesting comparison. But the one thing that’s very clear when you go through the experience of eating in a US restaurant, you think, people have been trained here. Everyone’s been trained. Quite often in the UK, you get a sense that there’s an amateurish sense that maybe they’ve done a bit of this job before, but they don’t really know the menu, they don’t…

Bruce Daisley (28:46.784)

No, can’t give you bit of advice on things. Look, and that’s a very superficial, subjective perspective on the fact that the way that they see industry there has got training more at the heart of what they do. And we get by with the cult of the amateur here. Now, that then leads into some of the discussion we’ve had here. If there’s a productivity gap between UK business and American business,

Then looking at the way that they think about training, development, systemic elements seems like a really important place to start. And it just strikes me in all of the discussion we’ve had here, we need to sort of professionalize our approach in the UK to all manners, all manner of trying to do things more effectively. And one of the most important parts of that right now is getting managers better trained. that a…

Anthony Painter

I think you’ve hit an edit. I think the job design dimension that you touched on is so, so I remember, by the way, getting a bar job when I was a teenager and the training I had was, um, you here’s, here’s a pint glass, just make sure you don’t get beer on the ceiling. But no, it is about jobs. And it is about managers and it is about the workforce is about the level of professionals. think what the U S does very well, it aligns incentives and culture, right? So there’s incentive with the tipping system, you know, clearly there was a huge commercial incentive and drive and behind it.

But then there’s a culture of improvement alongside that. So it’s got quite a good balance, actually, in its most successful businesses in the US. We see that in some of UK organizations. We don’t see it universally enough. So I think we should challenge ourselves to think about the job design at every level. And that absolutely includes how we design the right roles, capabilities, and skills for middle managers.

Bruce

Thank you to Anthony. And like I say, this whole load of stuff in the show notes for that, these, just a real exploration of that idea that bad managers are responsible for one in three of us leaving our jobs. And it’s real critical reminder of the importance of these things. Really grateful for company today. These, there’s a few more things, episodes coming up where I’ve had conversations with people that have been recorded. And I just want to put those out, not least sort of visiting an NHS Hospital Embarking and also a conversation about the role of trust, which again was one of my five themes for 2024. So you’re going to find a whole load of goodness in the show notes. Thank you for listening. I’ve been Bruce Daisley