Being a great manager is a blessing and a curse. The closer you get to your team members, the more you will inevitably be engaged on life’s tougher questions. Sometimes it’s because a team member is looking for guidance. And, sometimes it’s because they are generally interested in how you, personally, think about and navigate these topics for yourself.

So, what does this have to do with management development? I believe we are missing our Caprese Salad. We have thousands of ingredients, flavours, sauces, and spices in our management development pantry. And we push our managers into this over-stocked L&D pantry - without defining our Caprese Salad first.

Structure is what Management Development is missing. Collaborative, inspiring and engaging structure.

Measuring the return on investment on management training and development is a bit of a black hole. By definition, managers work through other people – not only their direct reports but also through collaborating with their management peers and senior management. Intermediate managers sit in a complex web of relationships, interactions and activities that impact multiple facets of the business across multiple time horizons.

So, how do you measure their effectiveness? Then, how do you measure their change in effectiveness that may come from an investment in L&D? Let’s explore a parallel abstract universe and see what dots we can join.

Three Week Rule: you should be able to go away for three weeks, without your laptop, and nothing tactical should be held up as result.

In high-performance environments, I have found job descriptions to be a total waste of energy. While the two-to-three page documents can be great box ticking tools for staff riddled with imposter syndrome, they do not get to the core of the role or the person you want in it. The internet is full of job descriptions. Millions. If you want one, go download one. That’s a good measure of how specific and insightful they are.

Every time I bring heatmaps up with executives and their teams, I get one of those pupil-dilating moments. We’ve all seen them. We’ve all used them. But we very quickly forget about them.

Career development is a core component of every executive manager’s job – both your own and the careers of those that you guide and grow. We know that we aren’t spending a lifetime with a particular company. We are here to do a job – a good job. And when that job is done, we will move onto the next job. That’s how the system works.

So, why is leaving a job still so hard to talk about?