Britain can't manage like this

A cultural aversion to management is undermining our economy

In Britain, ‘managerial’ has become a slur. The “manager in chief” is Keir Starmer - it’s become a stock phrase for attacks on the left and on the right. The word is employed to suggest a lack of passion, a lack of leadership - a dud. This criticism tells us more about ourselves than the PM. For in Britain, “management” is almost a dirty word. It is seen as an antonym to progress, achievement, or even competence. It is not a skill, but a drain on those who do the real work. As a result, we neither value it nor do it particularly well.

Compared with our peer economies, we have a singular disdain for the people running things. We invest less in management. Our managers are fewer in number and less well-trained than elsewhere. They tend not to attract the same premium in wages. In both public and private sectors, we see them as an impediment to success rather than an enabler of it.

At the same time, we wonder perpetually at our stagnation and lack of productivity. Our companies struggle to extract the same value from the same hours as our competitors. Politicians struggle with the delivery of almost anything. Major infrastructure projects and military procurement flounder into delays and cost overruns. Various bits of our state are struggling with even the basic duties of keeping people safe.

It starts to feel like the two must be related. What amounts to a cultural disdain for management manifests in these apparent failures. We shy away from the tested ideas of good governance, of building robust systems and deploying them well, instead of holding out for heroes – swashbuckling individuals who can just deliver. We fail to take running things seriously, and as a result, it is just not run seriously. By addressing this, through investment in cultural change, we might start to fix some of the issues that have plagued us not just over the last two decades, but long before that.

Britain has a culture of valuing amateurish endeavour, and this is apparent in our approach to management. Industry surveys suggest up to 4/5ths of UK bosses are so-called accidental managers, who have ended up running teams by dint of a promotion for excelling in a non-management role. Few are offered additional training, and when it does come, it is often short and perfunctory. Only around a third say they are offered ongoing assistance in leading other people or managing their workloads. That this is a cultural bias is reinforced by the evidence that foreign-owned companies tend to have better management practices than home-grown ones.

This matters. Poor management is an obvious bar to productivity growth. It is a major source of churn in the workplace. It is also hellish for the managers themselves, who struggle to cope with demands they never asked for and received little training to deal with. It creates disruptive workplaces with unseen costs; time wasted on unnecessary hiring, HR fallout, and the loss of the knowledge and momentum which is built up over time. Yet the issues go beyond the straightforward bits of personnel management.

Failure to properly equip and train our managers exacerbates our inability to invest properly. It means our economy is missing out on best practices when it comes to both systems and people. Previous studies have shown how Britain lags behind other countries in management practices. It is also poorer than most at investing in developing our people, with training for adults funded by both the state and privately in recent years. This goes towards undermining our productivity, but also likely crops up in other areas.

One of the pressing issues for the government is the rise of worklessness and, particularly, health-related absences. This has never recovered since Covid. Some of it is surely rooted in a paucity of management. Proper management would be able to ensure that the old, the sick, and those who have been out of work for a while can develop and flourish. Bad management fails to accommodate such workers and fails to ensure they are sufficiently productive to cover the extra costs of hiring them, pushing them out and making them an ongoing issue for the state to deal with.

In politics and the public sector, our disdain for management is even more apparent. The shift away from managers and administrators to “frontline staff” is a canard that almost every politician espouses. Managers are bad, wasteful, and useless. Yet none of this reckons with the reality of running stuff. Specialisation offers obvious advantages. Every minute a surgeon or a detective spends doing something other than their main job is usually a waste of a highly trained person’s time. More than that, it is usually done less well than someone who is trained in the strategic or operational management skills that the job actually requires.

Indeed, looking at our public services, the evidence is that they are rather poorly managed. A record number of police forces have been in special measures over the last few years. The biggest, the Met, was found to be inadequate in all but one category. The London Fire Brigade dipped into special measures in the same period. News this week of the national inquiry into childbirth points towards major failings in the NHS. That into grooming gangs acknowledges the dereliction of almost all parts of the state. Yes, some of this is the result of resourcing, but each of these defects also points to cultural and systemic failings, reinforced by poor management at all levels. A disdain for getting more, better managers involved will only worsen this.

Unfortunately, this cultural opposition to effective management is perhaps more deeply ingrained in Westminster than elsewhere. Parliament itself is highly dysfunctional in its management. There are no KPIs for MPs. There is little training or organisational management. Often, they are poor at managing their own offices, with high staff turnover, cronyism prevalent, and, of course, repeated stories of misconduct. Relatively few have experienced good management before coming to the House. This becomes more and more apparent as we see ministers unable to set and pursue goals, properly pull the levers of state, or achieve what they claim to want.

Journalists looking on are a little better. With love to my fellow writers, being self-employed gives you lots of things, but the understanding of how things get done in big organisations is not one of them. The tales from the papers suggest they, like Westminster, are decades behind good practice. Leadership is capricious, connections matter more than metrics, and office politics are prevalent. There is, frankly, little understanding of what good, modern management looks like and how government and public service can be held accountable for it. Even when it is mentioned, there is far too much focus on single stars or big exceptions, like the Manhattan Project, and not on day success.

This sense of cultural opposition to management is not a new phenomenon. It has, arguably, harangued the British economy for a century or more. Poor management ran through our failures in the post-war years. It appears to be holding us back again today, stagnating productivity in both the public and private sectors. To have a chance of advancing the economy, this needs correction.

Cultural issues are the most difficult to change, and this feels like a peculiarly British problem. Still, we must try. There should be greater incentives for companies to train their workers, especially in management. This can be shaped through rewarding investment in people, incentivising long-term strategic thinking, and encouraging a culture of good governance. The government should also focus more on attracting and retaining better (and often, better-paid) managers in public services. It should also proactively challenge assertions that such roles detract from service delivery.

Most of all, Britain needs to get over itself when it comes to running stuff. We need to be honest with ourselves that our culture is holding us back. We need to challenge businesses to invest in this properly, and we also need to reevaluate our own negative perceptions of management. Embrace it as a set of skills and as a science. We need to celebrate delivery, and encourage it in ourselves and our politicians. Most of all, we need to see management as an asset, not an insult. Something you aspire to, rather than accidentally fall into and awkwardly muddle through. Otherwise, we are unlikely to break the sort of productivity problems that have held us back for decades.