Is the key to Successful Management just plain old Management Training?

Attending management training courses and seminars to learn about how the likes of well known business and sports personalities from Greg Dyke to Martin Johnson have successfully managed and lead their teams and organisations can be useful. However, they will not necessarily help you to improve your skills and be a successful manager. While a great deal can be learned from others, if you wish to be truly successful then it is equally important to focus on developing and correcting your own weaknesses.

For example, it is probably easier to understand how your own behaviour and approach can demotivate your team and to do something about it, rather than learning a totally new approach, which incidentally might not fit with your natural style. In extreme cases others may see you as ‘faking it’ as your behaviour is not true to yourself.

Frequently managers de-motivate their employees by failing to understand the basics of human motivation. The most common failings are:

• Acting without integrity, by failing to do the things that have been promised.
• Being too aggressive and task orientated, disregarding individuals needs and work-life balance.
• Over controlling peoples work and taking away their personal responsibility.
• Making unfair decisions about work routines, pay and reward.
• Failing to engage people creatively by asking them to do meaningless work.
• Being incomplete or inconsistent in communications.
• Failing to get the involvement of others when making decisions that affect them.
• Continually being in ‘tell’ mode and not listening to others.

The role of management training should be to help managers to understand how their behaviour can de-motivate others, rather than simply showing them new role models to mimic. Management training should provide facilities for constructive feedback, and make room for, informal discussions, and peer coaching to help participants to change their behaviour.

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Management Training and Development – the role of the Line Manager

Too often management training and development is left to the province of HR or Training Specialists when in reality line management has an important part to play.

The potential advantages of line manager involvement in learning and development has long been recognised.

The line manager is in a unique position to reinforce learning from management training or other forms of development, by integrating them into an employees working life and promoting a positive approach to these types of activities.

So how should a line manager be involved in their staff’s management training and development?

1. The first area of involvement is for the line manager to set clear expectations with their staff, both in terms of what they need to deliver (job responsibilities, targets etc) and how they are expected to deliver these things (approach, behaviour at work, etc).

2. The next area of involvement is conducting performance appraisals and agreeing personal development plans, i.e. measuring the “gap” between what an individual delivers (and how they do it) and what is needed.

3. In agreeing personal development plans line managers should not just ask “What are this persons weaknesses?” but should also ask “Where will learning and development add the greatest value to their performance?”

4. Line managers should understand the breadth of learning and development interventions that are available to them. For example, too many turn to the ubiquitous “Management Training Course”, or “Presentation Skills Course”, when in reality there are hundreds of development actions that an individual can take from reading a book to learning to play chess.

5. Line managers should also take on more of a coaching role with their staff. Significant relationships exist between the effective provision of coaching and guidance by the line manager and levels of employee satisfaction, commitment and motivation.

6. Finally, to be truly effective line managers need to understand their role as a “sponsor” of an individual’s or team’s learning and development. For example, it sends completely the wrong message to someone if a manager asks them to attend a management training course but then prevents them from attending some or all of it.

As a sponsor, the line manager should:

· Invest time, energy and enthusiasm in their employees development.
· Demonstrate public commitment to management training and development by “walking the talk”.
· Sanction any hindrance or blocking behaviour from employees reference their learning and development.
· Be clear with their teams the importance of management training and development in raising standards and performance.
· Recognise successes.

Too often education and development is the province of HR or the training department but by becoming more involved in their managers training and development, line management will have a greater impact on their teams performance and capability, which will ultimately impact the performance of their organisation.

1. Gibb S (2003) Line Manager Involvement in Learning and Development: small beer or big deal? Employee Relations, Vol 25, No.3, pp 281-293.

2. Latest Trends in Learning Development and Training. CIPD Survey 2007

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How to evaluate the impact of Management Training and Development

In 1959, Kirkpatrick first outlined four levels of training evaluation:

· Reactions – ‘liking or feelings for a programme’.
· Learning – ‘principles, facts etc absorbed by the participants.
· Behaviour – ‘using learning on the job’.
· Results – ‘increased production, reduced cost’s etc’.

While a number of developments in evaluation have been made during the past 48 years, the basic tenets of Kirkpatrick’s work remain. Ultimately the “acid test” of an investment in management training and development is the results it produces. Clearly an organisation would not invest in a new product or service if management thought that it would be a flop!

Any evaluation must therefore start at the design stage of a programme.

What is the purpose of the management training?
What issues is the organisation struggling to resolve?
What does the organisation wish to see differently from its people?

For example, does the organisation wish to:

· Increase productivity of staff?
· Reduced mistakes/quality problems?
· Increased sales or market share?
· Have more effective and productive working relationships between managers/functions?
· Improve motivation and reduce staff turnover.

Once the outcomes of a management training and development programme are clear, it makes the task of evaluation much easier.

Building on the principles of Kirkpatrick’s model of training evaluation, the impact a programme has on individual managers, their teams and ultimately the organisation can be assessed in a number of ways.

· Individual – The impact the management training and development has had on the individuals performance and behaviour can be measured via achievement of personal targets (e.g. cost reductions, sales increases etc) as well as observations from their manager or via 360° feedback appraisals.
· Team – The impact the programme has had on the managers team can be measured via achievement of team targets and performance measures (e.g. customer satisfaction, absence rates etc) as well as observations on team behaviour from external/internal feedback surveys.
· Organisation – Ultimately the impact a management training and development programme has on the organisation can be assessed via the organisations own metrics (profitability, sales growth, market share etc) as well as internal employee satisfaction and motivation surveys.

It is vital that organisations assess the impact their management training and development programmes have to ensure that the investment they make pays off. To achieve this, the purpose and outcomes of the programme must be clearly defined and methods of monitoring set up to collect the relevant data at an individual, team and organisational level.

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Management development training for men and women – is there any difference?

We do know that men and women have slightly different characteristics, strengths and weaknesses. There are some observers who contend that in general women make better managers than men because they are usually more sensitive, responsive, organised and pay better attention to detail. Equally there are others who feel than men make better managers because of their general tendency to see the bigger picture, be more business like and more decisive.

So is this difference in style just a perception or is it based on any evidence?

We are aware of the animal studies than show the differences in behaviour between males and females that have characterised females as being more nurturing and of males classically exhibiting aggressive, dominant “A” type behaviour – but how far do these results transfer across to management roles in organisations?

We also know that there are differences in some physical performance aspects of men and women which have to be taken account – especially in occupations where physical strength and stamina is important e g The Army, The Fire Brigade

When we look at some of the more sophisticated Psychometric tests measuring personality characteristics such as 16pf, we do know that there are some gender differences which are significant enough for us to use different norm tables for men or women in order to normalise any comparative results.

So if we accept that there are some gender based differences in managerial style and approach should we then provide different forms of management development training for man and women?

I think that the answer is probably no – because there are other factors that are even more important to consider when we look at the role of a manager, their styles, approaches and when we consider the people that they are managing or dealing with as customers and clients.

The sorts of factors that are more important to consider are these:-

• What are the gender types and likely responses of the customer set for your product or service?
• How good are your managers at understanding personality differences and gender styles in this customer set? Can they deal effectively with diverse types?
• What makes a successful manager in your business from a competency point of view?
• What are the different learning styles of your participants on any training programme and how well are you delivering your programme to reach and appeal to these different styles of activist, pragmatist, reflector etc?
• What is the culture and style of your organisation that you are looking to reinforce and encourage – whether it is adopted my male or female managers is less relevant.

In conclusion whilst accepting that differences do exist in the styles of individual managers, there is a broad spectrum of styles and approaches produced by individual differences rather than by simple gender stereotyping and that there are other factors outlined above which are more significant.

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