Management Design: The “designs” we have now: You can manage only if you’re from here
The Manager by Design blog advocates for a new field called Management Design. The idea is that the creation of great and effective managers in organizations should not occur by accident, but by design. Currently, the creation of great managers falls under diverse, mostly organic methods, which create mixed results at best, and disasters at worst. This is the latest of a series that explores the existing designs that create managers in organizations. Today’s design: Hire as managers only those from within the organization.
In this “design”, the organization values promoting people into first-level and upper-level management positions from within. This is a natural tendency, because there are a lot of good outcomes from this process – it encourages thinking through management development and creating programs to support it; it creates career paths for employees; it assures that managers are familiar with company, department, and team procedures and expertise. The manager is networked already within the company. So if you are going to err on having this be your management design, this would be a good place to start.
However, as a design, it is still lazy, and there are some pitfalls and risks that need to be addressed.
