UK lags behind rest of OECD in management skills

Cath Everett

Sift Media

Freelance journalist and former editor of HRZone

UK lags behind rest of OECD in management skills

By Cath Everett

An influential HR body has called on the Coalition Government to find ways of encouraging UK employers to fill damaging gaps in current management and leadership skills profiles.

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development has published a Work Horizons report entitled ‘Good Management – A New (Old) Driver for Growth’, ahead of next month’s governmental Growth Review, which throws light on the myriad of uncoordinated and ineffective policies that have been pushed through in the last two decades to address the situation.

Despite evidence that management expertise is crucial to driving growth as well as a series of public commitments by UK governments to effect change, any improvements to date have been too slow. The result is a UK skills profile that continues to lag behind other OECD countries.

Katerina Ruediger, the CIPD’s skills policy advisor and author of the report, said: “Headline-grabbing proposals which call for making it easier to ‘sack the slackers’ are at risk of masking the real question we should be asking: why are so many UK workers still underperforming?"

The reason, in her view, was certaintly not a lack of stringent employment legislation as the UK had one of the most de-regulated labour markets in the OECD. It was rather "a crisis of management and leadership skills".

But simply firing underperforming workers did not address the root cause of the problem and Government should instead be focusing on helping employers to improve management capability.

“I think we’re at a crossroads. Policy efforts to date have skirted around the real issue and any policy initiatives in this area have been uncoordinated, short-lived and ineffective. What we need is a new approach, but the magic bullet policy-makers have been searching for does not exist," Ruediger said.

But turning back time and reintroducing workplaces built on low trust and command-and-control models would not work. In fact, the opposite was true, with employers ideally being helped to identify gaps in management and leadership skills so that they could proactively address the situation.

"These are often deeply rooted in organisational culture and at the most senior levels of an organisation, which means many employers do not recognise their potential shortcomings," Ruediger said. "For policy measures to resonate, therefore, they must help employers define what ‘good management’ looks like and encourage them to report on their investment in developing management capability.”

Key recommendations to help tackle this situation included:

Improved voluntary human capital reporting: the Government’s consultation on the ‘Future of Narrative Reporting’ should be seen as an opportunity to encourage employers to use people management information more meaningfully in order to understand what drives sustainable performance.
Government and intermediaries should promote existing tools and support services as well as identify best practice.
There should be more cross-departmental collaboration and an increased long-term political commitment, including a new focus on including management and leadership skills within the provision of business support. Training here should be designed together with employers to ensure that it met workplace requirements.
The Government should encourage Sector Skills Councils and Local Enterprise Partnerships to promote leadership and management as essential ‘skills for growth’.
It should be clarified exactly what management and leadership skills that organisations require and what training and qualifications are currently available.
People management considerations should be integrated into existing qualifications such as MBAs.
Advice should be provided on what constitutes a quality intervention for employers and individuals.
There should be a review of management and leadership capabilities and development opportunities within the public sector so that the Government can lead by example.