Summary
Farley Thomas argues that organisations place too much emphasis on senior leaders while undervaluing the role of frontline and middle managers. He explains how leadership status and visibility often overshadow the day-to-day influence managers have on employee motivation, performance and experience.
Thomas highlights how many first-time managers are promoted without training or preparation, despite management being a distinct professional skill. He calls for a shift in mindset, treating management as a craft that begins with apprenticeship and develops over time. The interview concludes that organisations serious about performance and engagement must invest far more in equipping and supporting managers, not just celebrating leaders.
We celebrate CEOs like corporate rockstars. But what about the people who actually shape everyday performance? In this short Forward Thinkers video Farley Thomas, co-founder and CEO of Manageable, explores how organisations have fetishised senior leaders while infantilising frontline managers and why that imbalance is hurting engagement and results.
- Discover why focusing on “status” over “influence” blinds companies to the true levers of performance.
- Hear why 80% of first-time managers receive no training and what that reveals about how we value management as a craft.
- Learn why Thomas believes management should be treated as a profession, beginning with apprenticeship and mastery, not accident or promotion.
This is a call to rethink what leadership really means and to recognise that great management, not hero leadership, drives great organisations.
👉 Watch now to uncover how reframing management could transform your performance culture. And listen to the full discussion on our podcast episode What is CEOs don't matter?
Transcript
Why organisations obsess over leaders
What I very much like as a phrase is the fetishisation of leaders within organisations. And for a few years now, this has really sort of struck a chord. And in parallel, the infantilisation of earlier career leaders, otherwise known as frontline managers, supervisors, middle managers, all of them are infantilised whilst this fetishisation goes on.
What is this phenomenon? Sadly, I think it's everywhere. And it's connected to status, wealth, perceived power, or actual power, control. And of course, leaders have all of these things, typically. And there is this sort of ecosystem that develops around them. And you might call it a bubble, you might call it an ivory tower, but there is this gravitational pull.
And I think it affects quite a lot of functions, including the people function in organisations. And there is a lot of effort expended to cultivate these people, nurture them, keep them on side, keep them functioning, keep them from going off the rails, etc etc, often called leadership development.
And at the same time, this infantilisation is going on. And these are relative nobodies, aren't they? You know, first time managers, frontline managers, they're kind of nobodies. And it sort of applies, I think, in society at large. You know, I think we, and I suspect, you know, we'll have to put our hands up to being part of the problem. Are we paying too much attention to these very visible corporate icons and not seeing the huge value of the lowly managers across organisations?
The hidden cost of ignoring managers
And I think we are, we are in a nutshell, perhaps confusing organisational status with day-to-day influence on employees' lives, employees' motivation levels. And of course, CEOs really want performance. And if you really want performance, you'd very much focus on the levers of performance and insist that all of your support functions or especially including the people function, for example, really focus on the levers of performance. And if you use that lens rather than power, you'll very quickly arrive at the frontline managers. This point about why we don't celebrate and properly equip line managers is a critical question actually. And if it's not on everybody's minds, I think it really will be, because we'll have exhausted all the other ways of driving performance and engagement up.
Management is a profession, not a promotion
And then we'd be left with this thorny issue of quite a lot of managers in, you know, in any organisation managers outnumber leadership or senior leaders by a significant multiple. And so, you will arrive at this destination one way or another. And most of the progressive people leaders that we talk to are vexed about manager development. I think here, maybe I'll go away from celebrating managers as the hero of organisations to making them culpable. Because so many individual contributors yearn to be promoted to that managerial position. And they understandably see it as a path to status, all of the things we talked about earlier that get you into the C-suite ultimately. And so they readily take on these positions without stopping for a moment to thik, have I got the right skillset? Have I got the right attitudes to do this properly, to lead other human beings? And how do I know if all I've done so far is be part of a team?
So on the one hand, it seems to be the sort of default pathway to success within organisations to take on responsibility for others. And at the same time, think first time managers themselves are all too easily just taking on the responsibility or the burden without stopping to think that this is actually a craft, dare I say it, a profession. And it's just as legitimate a profession as, let's say, the operations profession or the compliance profession or the human resources profession. These are all areas where you get properly qualified to fulfill your responsibilities. And of course there are manager qualifications, but I've really come across very few managers, first time managers in particular, that have had any training at all.
Why first-time management should be an apprenticeship
There's a piece of research, I think it was the CIPD UK that published it 80% of first-time managers in the UK have had no training whatsoever. And I don't think you can only point the finger at organisations. think a big chunk of these managers have probably not thought that they need to hone their craft, develop their skills. So I think there needs to be a mindset shift with all of these actors on the stage, recognizing that they're fulfilling very important responsibility.
And they're engaging in a new profession of management, of leading people. We need to start thinking about first-time management as the beginnings of an apprenticeship journey that culminates in mastery, but starts with apprenticeship. Roger Niebuhr, a professor at Imperial at the time when I spoke to him, talks eloquently about how expertise develops.
And I would love for us, for more and more of us in organisations to embrace this concept of every first time manager starts as an apprentice in the craft of management. And I think if we start there, then everything else will resolve itself.
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