Should We Require Manager Certification?

This might be old news to some of you, but Doctors used to be certified for life.

Doctors could get their rather substantial education, take their boards and be certified to treat just about anything for the.rest.of.their.life. But sometime in the 1990’s, that changed. Doctors must now retest every 6 to 10 years.

I don’t know about you but I didn’t know that the Doctor I visited in 1995 may have been certified in 1950 and never been tested again on whether he’d/she’d kept up with the latest info on health and treatment. (Come to think of it – it might just explain the leeches and why she hit me in the mouth with a chicken gizzard for stuttering.)

Re-certification for Doctors is a good thing. With the almost immeasurable pace of knowledge growth, most of what a Doctor learns in school is obsolete within a couple years or so. Ensuring our health providers give us the absolute best treatment is just smart.

Managers – Not Certified for Life

Contrast that with your management team.

I’ve gone on the record quite a bit that I believe managers are the real key to business performance. They can make or break a company. A great manager spawns many great managers. A bad manager eliminates future great managers and many times eliminates many great employees as well due to turnover. So, if you believe as I do that Management as a practice and a profession is critical to driving business growth, profit, and performance, why not certify them?

How many of the managers in your company are certified?

Wait… Is there a certification?

Checking the most authoritative source in the world – I googled it.

There are certifications for project management, business process management, weight management (I don’t think that one counts), but I could only find one that focused solely on the practice of management by itself. It is from the ICPM – Institute of Certified Professional Managers and offered in conjunction with James Madison University. But check out the course outline – – Planning/Organizing and Leading/Controlling. Those are so 1960’s. Business is changing. We are moving quickly from our industrial age, command and control focus to a much more chaotic, guide and herd focus. We are managing creative people now. Our jobs are more heuristic and less algorithmic – making management a much more difficult and at the same time, a much more critical part of the business success equation.

HR has their certification process and it’s respected and requested. Heck it is almost a requirement for getting any HR job at a larger company. Project managers have certification programs.  Accountants have certification programs. But managers, regardless of “function” do not.

None. Nada. Zip. No certification.

Managers should be certified.

And over time they should be re-certified. I’d even suggest that the higher up in the company you go, the more often you should re-certify. Call it a “reality check” to keep those C-level folks from thinking they aren’t responsible for managing people any more.

My Recommendation...

Create your own internal management certification process. Require any manager, or would-be manager, to certify and re-certify at least every other year. Courses on leadership, motivation, influence, psychology, statistics, software – and MOST importantly – CULTURE. Managers need to be certified so they understand and can recognize behaviors that reinforce the culture.

Great management is mission critical for business. We need our managers to be as educated as possible on how humans create work, create success, innovate and connect. We can’t afford to promote purely based on “functional” excellence. Our managers need to know how to manage.

Are we missing a critical element in our internal employee training? I think so.