High Fliers

Hand's up all those people who think the following is ABSOLUTELY TRUE!

From Management Issues.com

High flyers - those who reach a senior management position in a relatively short space of time - are more broad thinking, challenging of norms, open to doing things in new ways and more capable of understanding themselves and their colleagues emotions, than their senior management peers.

That's the conclusion of research by Troy Jensen of Kaisen Consulting, who assessed 800 senior managers with known career paths using psychometric tests on a range of personality traits including openness, conscientiousness and extraversion.

Managers were considered to be 'high flyers' if they had reached a senior management position within eight years of starting their career.

My experience of high fliers (alas the researcher did not even bother to use a spell checker) confirms this research - albeit not exactly the way I think it was meant to be read.

In my experience, if high fliers are "broad thinking", then they are usually male and the types of "broads" they are thinking about are NOT what is referred to in this article.

"Challenging the norms" can only refer to challenging people who are like the proverbial "Norm" in those old adverts sitting on a couch sipping a beer, with a huge beer belly and being a total sloth. High fliers do take umbrage at seeing others sitting around, especially if they are NOT doing their bidding!

"Open to doing things in new ways" sure - this is true, but conditionally so.

If for example the new way of doing things has been thought of by someone whose favour they are currying THEN they are open to doing things in new ways.

Any really original thinker in the organisation is fair game - his (0r her) ideas are generally welcomed and then stolen, marketed brilliantly and sold to the powers that be as the high flier's own.

The high flier under NO circumstances sticks around long enough to actually finish doing any of the work. This is usually left to the poor sod who had the idea.

If it works out, the high flier claims all the credit. If it fails then the high flier blames the implementation and tells everyone he (or she) meets, that if ONLY they had been "allowed" to implement the idea things would have been different!

What is exceptionally true in this research is that high fliers are more capable of understanding themselves and their colleagues emotions.

Their understanding is simple - "As a high flier I am out for all I can get and the devil with the hindmost and anyone who stands in my way needs to be discredited, maligned or in some other way gotten out of the road!"

THAT folks is my experience of high fliers and most of the more recent crop are truly around for such a little time that they have no idea how anything works or why.

However they have a WONDERFUL line of management jargon that they peddle to anyone who will listen and then hope like crazy that someone in their new fiefdom actually KNOWS what has to be done by whom and by when.

My advice? Take these management research articles with more than a grain of salt!