How hrd managers can be made globally competent

Chapter 13 excerpt : Management Development For at least the past seventy years, managers have been viewed as a dynamic and important element of business organizations. Given the turbulence in today’s environment, an organization must have a high-quality, flexible, and adaptive management team if it is to survive and succeed. 1 This is true even for organiza- tions that have chosen to restructure (e.g., with flatter hierarchies, and fewer per- manent employees) and empower employees to be more a part of organizational decision making. It is managers who are ultimately responsible for making the decision to change their organizations’ strategies and structures, and it is managers who must ensure that these new approaches are implemented, modified, and executed in a way that achieves the organizations’ goals. While they may do this in a different way than they have in the past (e.g., less command and control, more leading and coaching), managers still play a critical role in organizations’ adaptation and success. 2 In essence, using fewer managers in an organization makes it more important that each manager is effective. It should be noted that, even though popular press reports suggest that the number of managers is shrinking, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that the category of “management, business, and financial occupations” contained approximately 15.7 million people in 2008. Furthermore, this category is expected to show a net gain of 1.7 million jobs between 2008 and 2018, for a projected 10.6 percent increase.3 Management development is one major way for organizations to increase the chances that managers will be effective. While many believed that the ability to manage (like the ability to lead) is primarily an inborn capability, the current prevailing view is that most of the KSAOs (knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics) required to be an effective manager can be learned or enhanced.4 Efforts to recruit, retain, and assess managerial talent are discussed elsewhere.5 Management development is a very popular HRD activity. Management development has been defined in many ways. 6 For the purposes of this chapter, the following definition captures the essence of management development as it can and should be practiced in organizations: An organization’s conscious effort to provide its managers (and potential managers) with opportunities to learn, grow, and change, in hopes of producing over the long term a cadre of managers with the skills necessary to function effectively in that organization.7 First, this definition suggests that management development should be seen as specific to a particular organization. Although there appear to be roles and compe- tencies that apply to managing in a variety of settings, each organization is unique, and its goal should be to develop individuals to be more effective managers within its own context.8 Second, management development consists of providing employees with opportunities for learning, growth, and change. All of the issues pertaining to learning—and especially adult learning come into play as we seek to assist managers in “learning how to learn.”9 While there is no guarantee that particular individuals will take advantage of, or profit from, these opportunities, management development cannot occur unless oppor- tunities are at least provided.10 Third, management development must be a con- scious effort on the part of an organization. Leaving development to chance greatly reduces the likelihood that the organization will achieve the kinds of changes it needs and desires. Fourth, management development (like all HRD activities) should be directly linked to the organization’s strategy, that is, it must meet the organization’s business needs if it is to be a sound investment.11 While many cur- rent management development programs do not conform to this definition, we think this serves as a benchmark to which such programs can and should aspire. Management development can be described as having three main components: management education, management training, and on-the-job experiences.12 Management education can be defined as “the acquisition of a broad range of con- ceptual knowledge and skills in formal classroom situations in degree-granting institutions.”13 As we will describe later, the “formal classroom situations” to which the definition refers include a wide range of activities, with the classroom setting increasingly being used to bring together and process the results of outside activities to draw conclusions about what has been learned. Management training focuses more on providing specific skills or knowledge that can be immediately applied within an organization and/or to a specific position or set of positions within an organization (e.g., middle managers).14 On-the-job experiences are planned or unplanned opportunities for a manager to gain self-knowledge, enhance existing skills and abilities, or obtain new skills or information within the context of day- to-day activities (e.g., mentoring, coaching, assignment to a task force).15 In this chapter, we will discuss a number of management development activities that are used within each of these three components. Extent of Management Development Activities As mentioned earlier, management development is one of the most commonly offered approaches to HRD. In a 2010 survey, organizations reported using 27percent of their training budgets to providing management development, with an additional 22 percent for executive development. Strikingly, only 26 percent of all training dollars were spent on nonexempt employees, with the rest (25 percent) going to exempt-level, non-managerial employees. The total cost of formal training aimed at management (including executives) was estimated to be almost $26 billion.16 The most frequently cited reasons for developing managers include broadening the individual and providing knowledge or skills.17 Organization of the Chapter Management development comprises such a broad range of issues and approaches that we cannot cover it all in a single chapter. Rather, we will focus our discussion in the following areas: 1. Describing the managerial job, including roles managers must perform and the competencies necessary for performing them effectively 2. Making management development strategic 3. Assessing options available for management education 4. Assessing options available for management training and using on-the-job experiences for management development 5. Providing a description of two common approaches used to develop managers (leadership training and behavior modeling training for interpersonal skills) 6. The designing of management development programs DESCRIBING THE MANAGER’S JOB: MANAGEMENT ROLES AND COMPETENCIES Given that almost all organizations employ managers, the scrutiny under which managers operate, and the vast literature on management and its subfields, one would expect that we would have a clear idea of what managers do, the KSAOs necessary to do those things effectively, and how to identify and develop those KSAOs. Unfortunately, there is not an extensive research literature concerning what managers do, how they learn to do it, and how they should be developed.18 While it is true that popular conceptions of a manager’s role and development are available, scientific research has yet to provide a clearly supported and accepted model that can be used to guide management development. Even among the best empirical studies in this area, such as the Management Progress Study con- ducted over a thirty-year period at AT&T, there are significant limitations (e.g., small sample sizes, analysis of only one organization) that make it difficult to con- fidently conclude what most or all managers do and how they develop.19 The changes that have occurred in organizations in the past two decades have only complicated this picture. Many of the research studies from the 1970s and earlier looked at management in hierarchically structured organizations that operated in relatively stable environments. As we have pointed out many times, organizations must respond to environmental challenges to stay competitive, and the structures and strategies they use change over time. The role of management has changed in most organizations as well. It is likely that the established views of the management job may be more relevant for some organizations than others. This is not to say that what we learned in the past is useless. But we do need to know which aspects from the past are still relevant and descriptive of manag- ing at the present time. This underscores the need for HRD professionals to identify what the management job is (and needs to be) in their own organization before they can design and deliver management development processes and pro- grams that will meet the needs of their own business and contribute to its com- petitiveness and effectiveness. In this section of the chapter, we briefly describe several approaches to conceptualizing the management role to suggest a starting point in designing a reasonable management development program. As indicated in the definition of management development presented above, meaningful management development is likely to differ among organizations, considering the context and challenges facing each particular organization. Designers of such programs should begin their efforts by obtaining a clear understanding of an organization (including its external environment, goals, strategic plan, culture, strengths and weaknesses) and the characteristics of the target population (man- agers and managers-to-be). 20 The research available on what managers do, how they do it, and how they develop the needed capabilities can provide a useful base from which to begin the needs assessment process. It is unrealistic, however, to expect such research to provide the blueprint for any particular organization’s management development strategy. Approaches to Understanding the Job of Managing Researchers who have examined the job of managing have done so from at least three perspectives: describing the characteristics of the job as it is typically performed, describing the roles managers serve, and developing process models that show how the various components of managing relate to each other.21 The characteristics approach involves observing the tasks managers perform and grouping them into meaningful categories. McCall, Morrison, and Hannan review the results of a group of observational studies and conclude that ten elements of managing are con- sistently present.22 These elements indicate that the management job involves long hours of work (primarily within an org