Dear Annie: Once again, for the second time in three years, I've been passed over for a promotion that I believe I deserved. Most of the successful new services my team has developed started with my ideas, and everyone acknowledges that. But somehow, when it's time to put an idea into action, someone else gets tapped to do it. I asked my boss why, and he said that I have a great reputation in this company as a "reliable idea person," but that he doesn't see me as "management material," whatever that means. At the time, I was too disappointed to ask him for an explanation. Can you shed any light on this? How does one become "management material"? -- Always a Bridesmaid
Dear A.B.: Cold comfort though it may be, you're far from alone. Samuel Bacharach, a professor of organizational behavior at Cornell, has seen this situation so many times that he wrote a book about it, called The Agenda Mover: When Your Good Idea Is Not Enough. In his consulting work with Fortune 500 companies, Bacharach says, "I've spoken with dozens of brilliant 'creative' people, including many engineers, who are terribly frustrated -- not because they don't get credit for their ideas, but because, every time they propose something that shows promise, someone else gets to pick it up and run with it."
That’s partly because of what he sees as “an inherent cultural bias that creates an artificial distinction between ‘creatives’ and people who can execute.” But there are drawbacks to dividing up a company’s talent that way. One of them is that the person who's charged with the execution of an idea may not understand it as well, or care about it as much, as the person whose brainchild it was -- or he or she may simply have too many other things to do. "So the outcome often isn't as good as it could have been,” Bacharach notes. “It's not just an individual problem. It's a problem for organizations.” Moreover, he adds, most so-called management training is “beside the point. It’s designed as a charisma injection. Meanwhile, most companies aren’t giving people the real, hands-on skills they need to move their ideas forward.”
By that, he means political skills -- but, notes Bacharach, "the phrase 'office politics' carries slimy connotations for lots of people, so I call it 'agenda moving' instead." His book spells out in down-to-earth detail a method for turning yourself into that elusive thing your boss calls "management material." In a nutshell, here they are: