where should organizational training emphasis be?

One of the things I try to bring out when I interview executives for the Health Leader Forge is how they made the transition from individual performer to supervisor, and supervisor to manager.

Victor Lipman in this article in the HBR points out the fact that organizations tend to invest more in leadership training than in basic management training:

And as I neared the end of my corporate days, I realized I’d received much more management training in the last five years than I did in the first 20 years — when I really needed it — combined.

My experience in the Army is probably not reflective of corporate America. The Army invests a lot of effort in training junior leaders. Whether that training is effective or not kind of depends. But the effort is there, and the Army regularly evolves its training efforts.

My sense from the interviews I have done with executives in the civilian healthcare sector is closer to what Lipman talks about: if the executive was lucky, s/he had a mentor in her/his early days who could coach her/him.

Should organizations do more for individuals transitioning to supervisory roles? There's a fair amount of literature that reflects the fact that high performance as an individual does not translate well into high performance as a supervisor/manager. It seems that would be a good place to invest. How should it be done seems the question. It seems most organizations assume that the manager a new supervisor reports to will do the training, or the new supervisor will just figure it out. What kind of formal training is particularly effective for new supervisors? Are classes effective? Or would some sort of formal mentoring program be more effective? If mentoring, who should do the mentoring? I know I was always a bit leery of telling my boss I was struggling with anything leadership related.

It's a short editorial, but it raises some interesting questions.