A severe shortage of people managers

In some cases surviving post perfect storm will be very difficult indeed, because we find ourselves with a heck of a lot of individuals in key positions who are sadly lacking in people management skills. Unless we can do something about this - FAST - we probably have a crisis on our hands. The reason for a shortage of people skills goes back to the turn of the century (the height of the people wars). Anyone and everyone was getting hired , often for very specific skills and nothing else. As they progressed they were given people responsibilities but not any training or personal development to accompany them. As one wryly observed , ˜It is a whole lot easier to spend two days learning new project management software, or two weeks adopting a new strategic thinking model than to undertake the complex exploration of creating engagement and understanding with other human beings.' Absolutely right, there's one thing about people - they're messy to deal with.

In fact that is one of the reasons why trust went away forever. Managers used to manage people. Now ˜manager' is just a pejorative word on a business card. It is a fact that if you walk into any MBA class anywhere in the world you will see that less than 10 per cent (and often less than five per cent) of the course has anything to do with people.

And yet these are the guys and gals who are supposedly the next generation of top managers. But the other thing that distinguishes them is that they don't want to deal with people. People are complicated, they have emotions, they get sick, they have hopes and fears; they might even cry or burn-out. Newly-minted MBAs think laptops and spreadsheets and market-share are easier to deal with than complex people. Consequently, in hiring automatons and tech-driven nerds we have lost the ability to people manage. And with that loss, the ability to inspire , instil respect and the other ˜soft' skills.

In this, SMEs are highly vulnerable and need to make sure that they have sufficient people managers - as opposed to ˜technical' talent - otherwise an organisation will quickly come under tremendous strain.