One of my friends got promoted recently and invited me to join his celebration dinner. He is happy about his promotion. He shows his worries about his upcoming career path. The department is divided into 3 teams, and he is the leader of one of them. The other two leaders are more senior than him. He was chosen to take over the department the previous head left. Everyone understood where his worries came from.  

What I am curious about is why the company picked the one with the least experience to take over the department. This is how his boss analyzed the situation: The female supervisor of the first team is very experienced, and she can handle all the projects well. But no one will stay long, and no one trained to perform well. They don’t want the same situation to happen again. And afraid this phenomenon will spread to the whole department. Therefore, she was not considered for the promotion. The other male supervisor had the exact opposite situation. The team was stable and did not have any changes for many years. They are just being too content with the current status without much passion at work.

You can go further only if you have someone to replace you

The boss explained again that he chose my friend because of how he trains his team. He thought that his team had enough training and someone in the team could replace his current position. Thus, the boss decided to shift him to a new role with the new challenge. 

The story of my friend reminded me of a management method of JINGDONG called “Backup Management”. According to the book《劉強東自述：我的經營模式》, If a supervisor has been in a management position for two years and there is no one could be his substitute (heir), the company will ask him to leave. Since corporate always put continuity very importantly. To ensure that the company does not have someone holding the position for a long time and suffer any risk if they lose a supervisor. 

It would be great if a company is willing to train more management talents. But training the middle-level staff is much more difficult than the junior staff. I shared my views with my friend, and we summarized the following three difficulties in giving training to the middle-level. 

The gap between personal and company expectations

Most of the employees engage in the execution of work before reaching management positions, so employees tend to focus on their skills. However, when an employee enters a management position, soft skills become important when the nature of the work fundamentally changes. In many cases, it is necessary to solve problems with soft skills. These are two different skills, therefore it is hard to adapt. Of course, the company hopes that employees can equip themselves before taking charge of a management position, but employees will tend to improve more on practical skills, and these two directions may not be consistent at the beginning. 

The gap between theory and practice

When we go online, we can find many successful examples to learn from and some are from large companies all over the world. However, due to different cultures around the world, many ideas that are successful in other countries are difficult to implement locally. Those successful management theories can be observed in reality. As long as we extract some core elements from the learned theories and implement them in our departments with our experience, we may be able to see its effectiveness.  

From personal experience, there are millions of ways to succeed. And those are cases by case, many of which could not be adapted repeatedly. However, the ways of failure are similar every time; thus, the easiest way for us is to learn failure management to avoid failure. Then they result rather not being too bad.  

Difficulty in teaching management concepts

Management concepts are always abstract, is a mode of thinking more than a skill. Even if the whole management concept can be verbalized, it is also difficult to judge how much can be absorbed by the recipient. Many employees lead the team, the training is more focused on skills, but not on management concepts. Therefore, employees have not sorted out their management concepts before really engaging in a management position, and they need to go through a difficult period to adapt.

Simon So Head of Digital Marketing