Crazy idea: what if management was a licensed, regulated career, like traditional engineering, or being a nurse. Like if you have more than 5 "direct reports", you need to get a certification?
Here in Australia we're going mad for certifications. I had a friend who looked after kids in an after school program. A minimum wage job, but one that she loved. She'd been doing it for nearly 20 years. The government mandated that she needed a $2500 certificate in order to continue to do the job she'd been doing for two decades.
I don't believe there was anything that this certification could have taught her that she didn't already know. Heck, she should have been the one teaching the course. Instead it was being run by an organisation that specialised in running these kinds of certification programs, but certainly didn't specialise in the subject matter.
If we were to mandate certification for managers, my concern would be that - at best - it would end up as just another piece of paper. At worst, it would actively exclude the people who were most qualified and competent, like it did with my friend.
Professional training organisations may not have direct experience with the subject matter, but given a good curriculum prepared by someone who DOES have experience, I don't see why they couldn't deliver a reasonable result. I agree that any "Q and A" sessions, or questions along the lines of "What is it really like working as a..." would not be that useful, though.
Teaches everywhere.
To put it differently, in a 6-man team each employee is responsible and held accountable for around 1/6th of the productivity, but the team manager is responsible and accountable for 100% of the effort.
Hence managers earning higher salaries.
Upper management usually does not seem to care whether the people you manage leave the company eventually or try to change teams to get away from you.
I would be interested to know if that is actually the case.