There's an excellent discussion starter at the Harvard Business Online web site. It was posted by Michael Watkins.  Here's a quote (drum roll, please):

"In my work on accelerating leadership transitions, I still encounter lots of organizations that just don’t get it. They persist, against reasoned argument and data, to foster a “sink-or-swim” approach to leadership development. They hire and promote good people only to let them drown in the deep end of the pool. In the process, they damage the careers of high-potential managers, experience regrettable losses of talent, and weaken their leadership pipelines. Does your organization have a sink-or-swim culture?"

When I got my first promotion to management, almost forty years ago now, almost every organization was a sink or swim organization.  Sadly, things haven't gotten much better.

Three of our children have been promoted to supervisory positions. Two of them work for very large companies with huge training departments. Not one of them received any supervisory skills training at all. Sink or swim.

The Wall Street Journal reported that American corporations spend less than ten percent of their training budget on front line supervisors. Sink or swim.

A huge chunk of that miniscule training budget goes for prophylactic HR and administrivia. It seems like it's more important to those corporations to get the forms filled out right than it is to have good front line supervision.  Sink or swim.

The problem with sink or swim when you're responsible for a group is that you take the group to the bottom with you. Front line supervisors can be important agents of high productivity and high morale. They virtually create engaged workers.

But if you're in a sink or swim environment, it's more likely that something else will happen. It's more likely that you'll become one of the big reasons that people leave and that others become "actively disengaged."

On the one hand, that's good for me. I put what I know about becoming a great supervisor in my Working Supervisor's Support Kit. It's for supervisors who are in sink or swim environments but want to learn how to be great supervisors.

On the other hand, I'm just angry. Sink or swim causes a pitiful waste of the most important resources we've got: front line supervisors and the people who work for them. We can't afford that, especially not today.

Today we're in a world were prices and product designs and processes are increasingly transparent. Just about anything that makes big money for you today can be produced less expensively by someone, somewhere. Just about anything that gives you competitive advantage today can be copied virtually overnight.

People, complete with brains and commitment and relationships and knowledge, can't be copied. If you want long term competitive advantage in the Digital Age, you'd better depend on good people and the key to their productivity and morale: their supervisors.

Teach your supervisors to swim. Support them so they learn to swim well. That way you won't sink.

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Wally Bock has helped people learn to be great bosses for more than a quarter century. His latest book, Performance Talk: The One-on-One Part of Leadership, makes learning key leadership principles almost effortless by teaching through a story and providing lists of resources for further growth.

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