Do high performers always make good managers?

I'm a big sports fan so would have tuned in to Sports Personality of the Year this Sunday anyway but with the awful X Factor going up against it I tuned in with particular gusto.  Sadly the show seems to have borrowed some of the foibles from its reality tv brethren, but anway, overlooking this it was nice to recap on some of the sporting successes from 2009.  As a cycling fan my particular vote went to Mark Cavendish but I half expected Jenson Button to be crowned the winner, so I was very surprised to see Ryan Giggs given the gong.

Anyway, the point of this is that I read this morning how he is being tipped for a management role at Manchester United when he retires.  This sort of thing is incredibly common in football, with many former players given management roles seemingly on the basis of their playing prowess rather than any managerial skills they may have.

So do high performers always make good managers?

Certainly the evidence from the football world is not good.  Successful managers such as Arsene Wenger, Jose Mourinho and Alex Ferguson had modest playing careers.  If you look into this in more detail it's perhaps not difficult to see why as the skills required to be a good player vs a good manager are completely different.  Exactly the same applies in the corporate world.  We live in an environment where specialisation is increasingly the order of the day.  As human knowledge spreads ever wide it becomes increasingly difficult for employees to take a broad approach to knowledge, with the inevitable result being that people take a narrow sphere of knowledge and develop a deep understanding of it.

With leadership and management increasingly relying upon political skills to ensure that things get done, such investment into technical skills leaves high performers with a gap in their knowledge that will surely see them flounder if given a managerial role.  If technical specialists wish to get on in a management role it would seem prudent to brush up on your soft skills to help you should you find yourself in a leadership role.

I think the lesson from football is certainly that you need much more than the ability to perform a job well to then be a success at managing others.