Here is an excerpt from an article written by Jac Fitz-enz for Talent Management magazine. To check out all the resources and sign up for a free subscription to the TM and/or Chief Learning Officer magazines published by MedfiaTec, please click here.

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It takes time and mistakes to learn how to be an effective executive.

For more than a decade there has been chatter within HR about the talent shortage. The conversation usually focuses on special technical and professional skills. But what about upper management? There is a paucity of senior executives who have the experience needed to deal with today’s unique and highly complex problems.

The media is filled with news about top executives being bounced because their company is not making progress. We see it in many industries suffering from different problems. I’m forced to wonder why this disease is so widespread and where it started.

In 1989 American companies launched the first of many massive layoff campaigns. We had discovered our companies were bloated with jobs that were not adding value, but were breeding expense. We had lost several industries to foreign competitors and more were in danger. When the first round lopped off about 3 million people, it took out a few middle manager levels.

Twenty years later those people would have had two decades of on-the-job experience and would be prepared for senior positions. Unfortunately, many people who have inherited those responsibilities prematurely don’t have management growth scars. It takes time and mistakes to learn how to be an effective executive. They’ve not been tested as they would have been if they had slowly grown through the ranks.

Within five years after the early 1990s’ bloodletting, dot-com mania set in. People were told the old laws of economics no longer applied, but any half-baked e-idea was worthy of support. Five years later that myth exploded, and it took with it another opportunity for sustained management learning. By 2002 more than a decade of management experience had been lost.

In 2008 the world learned once again the laws of economics still rule. Value cannot be manipulated. Income must exceed expense. Value is immutable. To generate it you have to understand the marketplace fundamentals. Without that knowledge you are headed for another disaster.

So much for the good news.

The human resources profession needs to grow several upper management levels, and do it now. Take a lesson from the past. If you want to generate value, you need to have a value-generating plan. One-off programs of the month will never help your company be more competitive. Ninety percent of the competition still uses outmoded, fragmented development models; HR can help its company make a quantum leap ahead.

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Jac Fitz-enz is founder and CEO of the Human Capital Source and Workforce Intelligence Institute. Be sure to download a free white paper, “The Four-Step Process for Diagnosing and Teating Organizational Problems.”

I also highly recommend Fitz-enz’s The New HR Analytics, published by AMACOM (2010).