AUTHOR(s): Mumford, Alan TITLE(s): How managers can become developers. Summary: Work-based learning is suggested as an alternative method of management development as opposed to the traditional method of instruction of courses. Day-to-day experiences, job queries and job-centered discussions are all part of the continuous learning process. Three methods are defined in implementing work-based learning. These are: action learning, learning organization and competency approach. The effectivity of each method depends largely on the manager's ability to develop his constituents. The UK utilizes the competency approach, made possible by the Management Charter Initiative. The successful implementation through applied prior learning and crediting competence needs three factors in developing a productive management system: self-development, organization-derived development and boss-derived development. Personnel Management p42(4) June 1993 v25 n6 DESCRIPTORS: Assessment centers (Personnel management procedure)_Evaluation Executives, Training of_Technique Work-based learning, in which managers recognise and take advantage of learning opportunities in the course of their everyday work, can be a more powerful way of developing people than formal, set-piece management development courses which are seen as being tacked on to the job of managing. THE manager of a hotel is called from his office. An angry customer has complained to the receptionist that he had been interrupted in his bedroom three times in the space of half an hour, by a cleaner, the housekeeper, and someone checking the minibar. The manager takes his new deputy with him -- "an interesting experience for you" -- and they both listen while the customer repeats his complaint. The manager goes through the reasons why three different employees arrived in such a short space of time: "It is, of course, part of our policy of providing excellent service." The customer departs, still expressing dissatisfaction. The hotel manager and deputy return to the manager's room. The manager sits behind his desk, blows out his cheeks and says "So how would you have handled him?" A great deal of management development occurs in this way. An unplanned experience, a question from one manager to another, a discussion reviewing facts and opinions, a decision about what to do in a similar situation. Potentially these are all the elements of an effective learning cycle. There are some other things we know about this kind of experience. First, managers constantly claim that they learn from such experiences. Secondly, they rarely recognise at the time that they are 'learning' -- they think they are simply 'managing'. Thirdly, they may not have been introduced to the idea of a complete process in which the elements of learning are balanced. Finally and most significant, helpful interventions by the boss are all too rare. There are three main developments in the increasing provision of work-based learning for managers. Although they overlap both chronologically and in terms of content, they have been action learning (Reg Revans), the learning organisation (Peter Senge, Mike Pedler, John Burgoyne, Tom Boydell), and the competency approach (Richard Boyatzis). The shift towards work-based learning has occurred in part because of the powerful intellectual contribution of such people, but an even more important driving factor, perhaps, has been the demands of consumers for valid and relevant development. In fact, the three parts of the theoretical drive towards work-based learning coincides with the accidental reality of informal development stressed in the hotel scenario above. Not only are they all centred on learning from real work, they all demand that management development should succeed in putting life into an old management responsibility. If we accept that managers have a major responsibility for developing those who work with them, all these themes demand a major effort from those managers. In the UK the competency approach adopted through the Management Charter Initiative -- with its emphasis on applied prior learning or crediting competence -- will require successful intervention by bosses in a form which has not seriously been tackled in most organisations. The stimulus provided by the theories mentioned above, and the demand from managers for effective help with their development, mean we have to combine three elements to produce an effective management development system: Self-development A recognition that individuals can learn but are unlikely to be taught, and that the initiative for development often rests with the individual. Organisation-derived development The development of those systems of formal development beloved of personnel and management development specialists. Boss-derived development Those actions undertaken by a senior manager with others, most frequently around real problems at work. Formal management development systems insist that managers appraise, identify development needs, and provide time and money for people to attend courses. These are valuable and necessary processes through which we try to balance the often frantic pressures at work with more effective and planned attention to performance and development. These formal processes could certainly be improved and extended.[1] The significance of the case I am making can be assessed in at least two ways. If my analysis of the three major current themes of management development is accurate, how far do current formal schemes effectively provide the enhanced role of the boss in developing others? A slightly different form of test could be applied by looking at the resources currently devoted to helping managers to help others to learn. If we add up the days devoted to designing appraisal schemes and to running courses on effective appraisal, and compare that with the time devoted in most organisations to how managers can assist in the development of others, the disproportion is staggering. Some organisations run courses on how to be an effective coach or mentor. Useful though these can be, they all too often give managers the idea that the process of developing others is something which is added on to management as a special activity, not an integral part of the process itself. There are a number of things we have to do to enable managers to develop others more effectively -- including establishing why it is important, giving them a better understanding of the learning process, and developing the skills involved. The starting point for managers must be the managerial situation which provides the opportunity for development. * A boss arrives in a subordinate's office at 8:30am one Tuesday and says: "I have been thinking about that problem with client Y you raised with me. I think it might mean not just a specific problem of that kind but something that runs across several. Why don't we get together for two hours on Friday, review what the issues are and how we might tackle them?" * A customer phones with a quality problem arising from a recent major delivery. They want the supplier to send their production manager and quality manager to see the reality of the problem on the customer's side. The production manager decides to take a graduate trainee with him, saying 'Keep your eyes open, take notes and we will talk about it afterwards.' * A director close to retirement has been given a significant project to do, and recruits a young man thought to have high potential as the finance department's representative. After the first two meetings of the project group the director calls this person in and says: 'I would just like to talk over some of the things that are happening on the group. How do you think things are going?' These examples, like the hotel case with which we began, contain some recognition on the part of the boss (or, in the last case, the mentor) that the work situation offered an opportunity for learning. Unfortunately such examples are relatively rare, and that is why our first concern in helping managers to help others learn must be on helping them to recognise opportunities, and then to use them more effectively. The big O Managers and, sadly, some management development advisers think too often in terms of what I call the Big O: "We have this splendid chance for you to move from sales into marketing." Even more to the point: "We are moving you to work for Jane Smith instead of John Brown. You will find she is a quite different sort of manager." Presenting individuals with this kind of opportunity is usually better than not providing them with an opportunity at all. However, we need to give much more detailed attention to exactly what kind of learning opportunities are likely to exist within the Big O. What new experiences will be on offer? What are the differences in the work? Who are the new and different people the younger manager may encounter? The best way to help managers to help others is to get them to start by considering the kind of experiences from which they have learned. The following exercise has the advantage of being both simple and immensely productive: Identify the two most helpful learning experiences you have had, and the two most unhelpful. Once the general ground of learning from experience has been established, it is possible to go to a more specific exercise: Think of an experience of being helped by another manager. What was the experience, and what did the other manager do to help you? It is possible to ask people to do these exercises without any stimulus or suggestion of what they might consider. An alternative or supplementary approach is to give them a list of situations in which a manager can offer assistance to others. The list is lengthy but includes learning from a new project, membership of a task force, confronting difficult colleagues and reviewing completed tasks.[2] The crucial point when helping managers to recognise such opportunities is to get them to consider first the activity or the situation, and not to ask them to think initially about learning opportunities at all. Managers think in terms of activities, not learning opportunities] It is often a discovery for managers that things they have considered purely as work activities are learning opportunities as well. Like the Moliere character who discovered he had been speaking prose all his life, they can be helped to see what they have always taken to be 'natural work' can be used also as a creative learning opportunity. Our main concern must be to facilitate learning through our understanding of real work in the manager's world, rather than attempting to impose separate management development processes. Take the following examples: * A manager does a lot of coaching and counselling informally, finding it effective and less threatening than to be called into the manager's office. They just sit down with someone and say: 'How is it going. Tell me what you are working on.' That gives the people a chance to raise things with the manager without making too big a thing of it. * A factory manager is involved in making the arrangements to close down his factory over a nine-month period. He arranges a meeting with all his subordinates in a group where they discuss each week what has happened, how their plans are going and what actions need to be taken. Then at the end of it he sets aside 20 minutes to ask what they have all learned from what they have done that week, and whether there is there anything they should do differently. The major message we have to convey to managers in helping them to help others is that we are not encouraging them to take up totally new activities. Managers do not talk about coaching much, unless they have been on a coaching course. They talk about problem solving; we should start from there, not from 'How to be a good coach'. However, what we are adding to their normal understanding of their managerial work is an extra dimension, explicitly involving learning. Learning should be drawn out from the managerial experience, not bolted on as a quite different extra. For people fully to get the benefit from that experience they need to understand some concepts and techniques which will help them to learn more effectively. One, the learning cycle, was introduced at the beginning of this article. The factory manager quoted above is engaged in the reviewing stage of the learning cycle. Two important practical points emerge from thinking about this kind of approach. The first is that if you simply suggest to a boss that they ought to lead a learning review, the response is not likely to be favourable unless they have already had some kind of introduction built on their own experience. Even more significant, the idea of a review is very much a managerial concept, not just a learning one. Managers are used to the idea of looking back to see whether things worked out, and if not why not. For most managers most of the time, helping others with learning will mean retrospectively reviewing an experience rather than the prospective planning of learning from a future experience. Of course we need to encourage the latter, but retrospective analysis is not only more in tune with the way in which managers behave in other respects of their managerial life, it also provides immediate practical examples through which a manager can be encouraged to work. Wrong emphasis Perhaps this is why some formal management development processes have not worked as effectively in the past as we would have liked. We have put too much emphasis on planning ahead, and not enough on enabling managers to use, understand and then build on their past learning experiences. Once managers have been engaged in helping to interpret, re-interpret and better understand their past work experiences, they can be encouraged to help others to go through the same process. Beyond this there lies the rosy future of better identified future learning opportunities. In a sense there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that the kind of approach suggested here can work. Some managers have always given time and attention to the development of their subordinates. The question is not whether some managers do it naturally, but whether we can encourage more managers to do it, equally naturally but with some previous encouragement and thought. My experience on this is hopeful. I find managers are intrigued, stimulated and enjoy the kind of activities described here. Again comparisons can be drawn with appraisal training. All too often this is approached by the management developer with a firmness of purpose only equalled by the unwillingness of managers to participate. The situations and processes described here recognise and build on things which managers are aware of, rather than imposing something which is all too often outside their experience and their sense of commitment. Managers develop others for a variety of reasons. Sometimes the formal system instructs them to do so. Sometimes they expect to reduce problems by increasing the ability of their subordinates to handle problems on their own. Nor should we ignore less self-centred reasons. For at least some of them what I call the principle of reciprocity occurs. Managers like helping to develop others not just because of the direct return in the sense of performance, but because they get a glow of satisfaction from having helped someone. The task of helping managers to develop others does not have to be as difficult as management development systems have seemed to make it, if we base our guidance on using real situations, rather than contriving special management development processes. REFERENCES 1 Mumford, Alan. Management development: strategies for action, IPM, second edition, 1993. 2 Honey, Peter and Mumford, Alan. Manual of learning opportunities, Honey, 1989. Alan Mumford has been both a company director of training and development and an academic in the subject. He is now a consultant and writer on director and management development. His new book, How managers develop managers, will be published by Gower later this year