Oh, this is what happens when you cut out soft skills and other management education

When I was an analyst at Gartner, through 2000, I received a lot of requests from organizations, including academic, military, and mostly corporate, looking for best practices in soft skills training. These organizations, or a least individuals within them, realized they were doing an insufficient job in the areas of leadership, project management, innovation, and stewardship development, just to name a few.

At the time, I really couldn't recommend anything. Extensive management training programs (those five day retreats of yesteryear) were being eliminated faster than you could say "open buffet", and new simulation based training had not yet emerged. All I could do was to write extensively that the state of management training was in crisis, and would cause significant problems in all organizations as a result in the upcoming future.

For the military, fast forward to 2005; there emerged a tremendous consensus that our soldiers were ill prepared to win the hearts and minds in both Iraq and Afghanistan. More subtly, there was concern from many within the government services that they had failed to communicate and work effectively with the US's political leaders.

For corporate America, fast forward to today, and the deep economic recession in which we find ourselves. The management of banks, car manufacturers, and retail have all but failed.

The United States military, to their credit, realized it had to shift significant training resources to the softer and interpersonal skills to augment their ability to apply lethal force. Leaders within the US Army a few years ago began down this path, and recent speeches from the top officers at I/ITSEC have both acknowledged their nascent success in soft skills training (as it happens, using simulations) and set the context for future work.

Within academics, for the last five to seven years, there has been a bottom-up movement, spearheaded by innovative professors and other instructors to develop critical "learning to do" skills within the students to actually prepare them for the outside world and speaking their language of virtual worlds and web 2.0. These instructors have taken political risks and assumed personal responsibility to drive new practices. Most, but not all, have benefitted organizationally from these investments.

However, in corporations, even today, despite the dismal economic conditions created in part by untrained management, there is still little focus on formerly developing emerging leaders. In fact, if anything, there is more pressure to reduce the budgets of formal learning programs.

With respect to Jay Cross, here's a joke. What is the difference between
informal learning and no learning? Lipstick!

As I have said and written about previously (The first thing to do is fire the old training guard), this is in part due to the baby boomers who still have a stranglehold on most organizations' training capabilities. They are in defensive mode, counting down the years to retirement, and pandering to the short-term needs of their current benefactors.

So many of the dire predictions of the consequences of cutting entry-level manager, middle manager, and high potential training have all come true. This may spark the realization that there needs to be a new philosophy and respect for formerly developing the people who will be running the organization.

But more realistically, that will probably only happen after the economy has truly hit rock bottom. This is not because anyone will change, of course. It is just that when corporations miss revenue targets, their subsequent cutting costs will drive the "earlier retirement" of the current baby boomers, and then the promotion of the Gen Xers and Millennials who have already shown themselves to be more innovative and aligned with longer term organizational goals will fill the gap created.

In the meantime, I can listen to stories of corporate woes and feel badly for the innocence of many of the casualties. But I can't be surprised. Only a little angry.