Research Paper

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Before we get into management training, we need to know who is a manager. In addition, what are the duties of manager? “A manager is someone who operates and runs the business organization on behalf and in the interest of one or more private owners of this organization. In today’s business, organizations are managed by individual who have no direct ownership interest in the business, or only a relatively small stake by owning a few shares” (Kubar, M & Abell, D. (1998) Management Development: A guide for the profession, Chap1).

Management Development has reemerged as a very important tool for the survival and success of organizations in a changing work environment everywhere. “This has happened for two reasons: ethical lapses by leaders of some of the world's largest and best-known organizations and the need to develop succession plans for the next generation of leaders.” (Author: Sung.T, Source: T+D article, Title: Coaching better leaders, Mar 2003, Vol. 57, Issue 3, p14, 1p, 1c).

For a manger to be successful, we need to take into account many different learning style of adults (employees), for example you may find someone who needs to apply his/her learning to be able to learn, while others may need find learning without any need for application is acceptable. Just as Mary Chapman said to the FM, ““ ‘I don’t believe that people are born leaders. People are not born managers, but they can develop good leadership and managerial skills through on-the-job and formal training. But you can be born with some personal qualities and characteristics that make it easier, such as confidence, determination, drive, and empathy.’ ” (Source: Financial Management (CIMA) article, Title: Good leaders are made, not born, Sep 2001, p6, 1/3p. 1c as cited in Chapman. M, director-general of the institute of Management)

Another reality managers need to realize is employees need not feel that managers don’t trust them because this in turn may lead to mutual mistrust, instead there should be mutual trust because only then will the employee be open to suggestions made by his/her manager and/or supervisor.

“Learning the art of silent responsiveness has been described as the key to good listening” (Hayes, J, 1943-Developing the manger as a helper/John Hayes {self development for managers}). Listening is another factor many mangers do not emphasis, although if managers have listened well they would have solved much of the problem because by then they would have understood what the problem was and hence would be able to solve it..

To show the speaker he is listening, he could use the mnemonic “SOLER” (Hayes, J, 1943-Developing the manger as a helper/John Hayes {self development for managers} as cited in Egan, The Skilled helper) as an aid to help you show you are listening.

S: face the speaker squarely. O: Adopt an open posture, L: Lean the upper part of your body to the speaker, E: Maintain eye contact, and R: Try to be relatively relaxed while trying to engage in these behaviors.

Much of the training programs tend to be one shot and very extensive causing employees to forget, which is why you need to follow up and see which areas they need more focus on. Try to motivate them for training programs instead of forcing it on, this will just make things worse, and instead of learning, they will be too frustrated to be able to learn anything.

Tell employees what you expect of them; provide them with feedback while they are trying to do what you want, make the work worthless and possible, and reinforce them.

Successful managing could start right ahead of organizations but they tend not to see it, it is training programs for managers to be able to cope with ever changing environment of the organization and hence achieve better productivity. Recently organizations have started realizing the importance of training programs for managers.

There have been many researches in the past but these researches not have emphasized the real way of educating managers. In the next section I will explore two different studies that emphasize most importantly on the way mangers learn.

The first research was conducted to show the different ways of learning. It explored the cognitive style of management in which the mechanism that combines the internal state of information to the external world and imposes upon it a particular structure and form.

The way of representing information is the Verbal-Imagery(V-I) way. In the Verbal-Imagery, condition learns by verbal presentation of information and visual presentation of information.

Research has shown that interacting the verbal-imagery and the modes of presentation and its effects on learning could lead to the following proposition: “designing management education that accommodates individual differences in verbal and imagery modes of representation through the use of appropriate instructional and learning strategies will lead to enhanced learning

performance and increased learning competence (learning to learn)” (Proposition 1). {(Author: Sadler-Smith, E, from Acadmey of Management Proceeding article, 2002, title: The role of cognitive style in management education, pC1, 6p)}

There are two modes of processing of information: The first is Rational-Intuitive, and second, is Wholist-Analytical.

In the rational-intuitive(R-I): “Intuition may be described as immediate judgment based on feelings, and analysis as judgment based on mental reasoning (i.e. rationality)” {(Author: Sadler-Smith, E, from Acadmey of Management Proceeding article, 2002, title: The role of cognitive style in management education, pC1, 6p) as cited in Allinson and Hayes, 1996}. The intuitive and the rational style both have their strengths and weaknesses which may create a need for developing a strategy that allows people to use their dominant style with the other style as a helper.

Theorizing and research leads to the following proposition: designing management education that accommodates individual differences in rational and intuitive modes of processing through the use of appropriate instructional and learning strategies (for example: (that is using a combination of rational and intuitive processing) will lead to enhanced learning performance and increased learning competence (learning to learn) (Proposition 3). {(Author: Sadler-Smith, E, from Acadmey of Management Proceeding article, 2002, title: The role of cognitive style in management education, pC1, 6p)}

In the wholist-analytical (W-A): “this construct comprises two facets – whether people ‘take the whole view or see things in parts’ ”. {Author: Sadler-Smith, E, from Acadmey of Management Proceeding article, 2002, title: The role of cognitive style in management education,}.

There is a fear that those wholists that the distinction between the parts of a topic can become blurred due to the huge amount of information they are trying to keep. While for analytics, they may focus on one part of the whole and therefore may exaggerate in it. Evidence provided has suggested that W-A interacts with the structure of teaching material to affect performance.

“This and other research leads to the proposition that: designing management education that accommodates individual differences in analytic-wholist and serial-global modes of processing through the use of appropriate instructional and learning strategies will lead to enhanced learning performance and increased learning competence (learning to learn) (Proposition 2).” {Author: Sadler-Smith, E, from Acadmey of Management Proceeding article, 2002, title: The role of cognitive style in management education,}.

In the second research, the quality of managerial learning on the job was being measured. There were two groups, the first group was the control group called the European group, and the other group was called the Dutch group. Both groups were working in the same company. The difference was the Dutch group had a work experience of more than 8 years and has BA or BSc degrees, whereas the European group had MBAs and had little work experience.

When the experiment was done results has shown no significant difference between the two groups as to the learning on the job. One thing, which did have a significance is the support of the boss. The Dutch groups were more familiar with their bosses who caused them to be more comfortable and hence this kind of support helped in management development, on the other hand, this caused a little disturbance to the European group and not taking into account the different nationalities and culture of the European group compared to the Dutch group.

(Authors: Van der Sluis.L, Williams.R, & Hoeksema.L, Source: International Journal of Human Resources Management, Title: Measuring the quality of managerial learning on the job, Dec2002, Vol. 13, Issue8, p1266, 13p, 7charts, I diagram)

This shows that the most important is the way mangers learn, it is the style of learning or educating mangers that matters, because this might help mangers achieve a better performance if the right training program was applied. It does not matter whether they had MBAs or BAs, but the more experience you have the better it is, since you will be more relaxed and comfortable with your boss.

A case study about the county of San Diego applying a development leadership-training program to many public sectors that was about to lose all of their high-level employees because of retirement programs. The case study emphasized the importance of 360-feedback, the effort made into the training programs for leadership position by the participants and managers, the participation of participant in projects and team work, and the participation of upper managers in the training programs as well. All this has created an emotional and successful environment in which the employees can work happily in and work on improving their performance for their future positions.

Another point I would like to emphasize on, the reason behind the usefulness of this training program is that after the training program was applied the employees were very much appreciated for their hard work by a celebration. This rather gives employees a push to start their work knowing that they will be appreciated in the future for any hard work they are doing.

Evidence to the happy employees can be seen from their statement:

“The Leadership Acadmey was a great opportunity to interact with top county leaders with the wisdom and experience. The Acadmey provided the foundation and vision to assist me with my successful transition from the manager to leader.”—Mike, Labor Relations Manager

“The leadership Acadmey shows how to make the transition from manager to leader, and presents practical knowledge and skills to make a leader effective and successful.”—Dick, Pollution Control Director

“The leadership Acadmey has taught me that leadership means working with staff toward a common goal with a clear eye on this county’s vision…”—Tom, Environmental Service Manager

(Author: Marine E.G, Source: Public Personnel Management article, Title: Ensuring the organization’s future: A leadership development case study, Winter2002, Vol.31 Issue 4, p431, 9p, I chart)

When the training program was finished, this did not mean that the training program do not go on, in fact it goes on so that if there is any potential leader seen then the opportunity would be available for these potential leaders to go up the ladder to higher levels.

If we looked at the true cost of training we would find a lot of things that most of us forget about it, such as sick leave, lost production, paid vacations, hospitalization, education benefits, replacement costs during vacation or sick leave cost, until the person responsible or the job comes back a new replacement must be found. The time taken to train a new employee and the time taken to find one is a huge cost in itself.

Lost production means that a manger may have to do everything on his/her own, The inability of the manger to help his/her employees to grow their abilities, and hence unable to delegate work to them if he/she was busy with other things. Lost production could also be due to high turnover in the organization due to mutual distrust, absenteeism, sick leave, vacations.

There will be managerial inability to cope with the changing work environment due to the changing conditions in the economy.

Whereas, on the other hand, if the manager were training he would be able to train other employees, cope with difficult situations more easily, mutual trust and respect on both side (management and employees).

If are going to argue on why manger should receive a significant portion of the budget then I would like to think of mangers as the building blocks, on which the whole organization is dependent on. Therefore, if this building block fails to do its job then no matter what you try to fix in the organization whatever you are tying to do will sure fail.

Mangers are the top leaders they make decision, I do not mean by that centralized decision, but making sure, everything is going on as scheduled. Of course, you can not delegate such important decision to any lower-level employee.

A manger is supposed to have many experiences because he is the one who gets to solve all the difficult questions, and cope with difficult situation, plus all employees look up to their managers as their role model and should follow if ever they wanted to be successful.

Employees really depend on their management for their morale support, so if the management did not give the required support? Then who will? This is part of the managers coaching and mentoring.

I think a manager should be coached well to be able to coach well, when they manager is being trained, train him/her with the best way that best suits his/her learning needs and not on what is being provided. Training may be costly on the short-term but will sure turn out to be useful on the long-term enhancing the productivity of the organization and lowering the turnover of employees.

References:

(Kubar, M & Abell, D. (1998) Management Development: A guide for the profession, Geneva, International Labour Office, 1998)

(Source: Financial Management (CIMA) article, Title: Good leaders are made, not born, Sep 2001, p6, 1/3p. 1c as cited in Chapman. M, director-general of the institute of Management)

{Author(s): Fulmer, Robert.M, & Marshall.G, The leadership investment: how the world’s best organizations gain strategic advantage through leadership development(2000)}

(Author: Hayes, J, 1943-Developing the manger as a helper/John Hayes {self development for managers})

{Author(s): Hoberman, S & Mailick, S, Experiential management development: From learning to practice (1992)}

{Author: Quick, Thomas L., Training managers so they can really manage, Title: Confession of a frustrated trainer (1991)}

{(Author: Sadler-Smith, E, from Acadmey of Management Proceeding article, 2002, title: The role of cognitive style in management education, pC1, 6p)}

(Author: Sung.T, Source: T+D article, Title: Coaching better leaders, Mar 2003, Vol. 57, Issue 3, p14, 1p, 1c)