Information about it is on my blog at:
http://interactiveasp.net/blogs/natesstuff/archive/2008/10/07/fall-2008-utah-code-camp-announcement.aspx

Official Announcement at:
http://utcodecamp.com/

I think what you are doing is great. I have been in a management position where managers were left on their own to either sink of swim. The management training that was offered was simply a reiteration of the company values and nothing else. Eventually, even that training moved from once a month, to once a quarter, to twice a year when it wasn’t canceled. It is great to see the church doing something to maintain the investment in the managers it has chosen to hire.

If your manager was promoted not for their management skills, but because they were extraordinarily good at what you’re now doing, there are several natural consequences.

The first is that they tend to micromanage, focusing on the “how”, instead of the “what and why”. After all, they’re very good at your job, have usually done it for a very long time, and find that expenditure of their time more natural (and fulfilling) then the less familiar responsibilities of a manager.

The second is that they tend to view their employees simply as a means to a predetermined output. You’re there to perform a desired task and you either succeed or you don’t. They don’t look for leadership potential, but for your ability to perform the tasks you’ve been assigned. They have to learn to do both.

Finally, this kind of manager often feels threatened by those under them that do have the most leadership potential. Rather than feeling empowered by a highly talented team, they’ll often intentionally (or subconsciously) hide, or stifle that talent.

In each of these cases, the result is that your most talented, promising employees will often leave in order to move up, as you have suggested. When you see this happening (along with other signs of micromanagement and/or the hesitancy to really “showcase” and promote star employees), it’s often a sign that your managers need further training. At least that’s what I’ve found.

But employees represent a vast investment, and the longer they’ve spent with you, the more the value of that investment shifts from actual hard currency (salary, benefits, etc.), to softer, less easily replaceable things like systems, architecture, and code familiarity (on the tech side), along with all the internal cultural stuff, etc. I’ve found these “soft skill” values to be even greater within the marketing/sales/HR aspects of companies, where soft skills represent a greater portion of an employees internal value.

So the value proposition of investing in employee leadership is that not only do you have more effective leaders/managers within your organization, but you have trained replacements should one of those managers leave or be promoted, and you establish an environment of opportunity that not only helps retain top talent, but encourages them to shine even brighter.

But one of the surest ways to build these skills is giving them what I call “managerial microcosms”, small settings where they assume the roles of the manager, or at least some of them. Combine that with an overall leadership approach that encourages your engineers to make their own decisions within clearly communicated boundaries, and you end up building managers (and leaders) “line upon line”.

What’s more, because those “managerial microcosms” are impermanent, it lets them (and you) know if it’s a role that naturally suits them and thereby avoids the awkward situations that arise when a recently “converted” engineer discovers what he really loves is engineering.

Thanks for another great post.

Perhaps it’s a generational thing, but I don’t usually go into a job expecting to ever get a substantial promotion or change in job description. Most organizations are not able to adapt job responsibilities with enough fluidity to maximize their employees’ growing skill set. I have just come to expect that the way to get to a higher wrung is to jump to the next ladder.

In your estimation, what is the value proposition for businesses to make long-term investments in employees’ leadership?

Thanks for all you do!

[JPD: I love the book! We have not yet read it. We've yet to repeat an author, but with this one we might have to!

Most good engineers want to be leaders, not managers, but they go down the management route thinking that’s the way to leadership (and in some IT organizations, those are the only leadership positions available).