Managing Leadership^®

This issue of management development - and of who is primarily responsible for it - has come up in a wide range of forms in associated work recently. One example of this is a recent Infoline on the topic for the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD); this was written for organizations.

But the question of individual responsibility in this regard has also been prominent recently, so I thought I would use this venue to offer a few suggestions about the topic over the next few days. They can be adapted and applied by managers at all levels, all of whom have self-development obligations and opportunities.

Many people think that management development is something that happens to them. But successful managers don’t just go in one end of a training pipeline and come out the other as a manager. There are two key things to bear in mind, here:

1. You are responsible for your development as a manager and for your career. Not your boss, not the HR department, not the most “cutting edge” MBA program or consultant-designed education program. You.
2. To develop, you must practice management. Management development isn’t a passive process wherein you attend a class, read a book, or sit through a workshop, then collect your attendance certificate and go back to work to claim your promotion. You get ideas, glean insights from others’ experience, and develop some useful conceptual frameworks at such events. But you develop as a manger by managing.

Learn from every source available to you: listen, read, even take classes. But then decide for yourself what makes sense, test it in your own management work, learn from your real-life experience with it, and build on that experience to improve.

As you gather information such as this, bear in mind the following three forms that it can take:

1. Research. Academic institutions and large consultancies spend a lot of time and effort trying to understand all aspects of work - especially, of management. They then present these in formal courses of education, workshops, or other presentations. While there is a lot of chaff out there, there is also a lot of wheat. Learning how to distinguish between the two is as important as benefiting from the good research.
2. Others’ experience. Many formal study programs are based on surveys of managers’ careers and perceptions. Others may be presented or facilitated by managers or those who advise them. Again, the judgment of such people is far from infallible, but you will gain much from seeing how they perceive and evaluate their experiences.
3. Working models. Many conceptual frameworks have been developed to describe management methods. These are useful intellectual tools to help you organize information and evidence into a context that makes sense of what you see happening around you. Be careful, though, to avoid becoming overly enamored of any particular tool - use them to help you understand and manage your work; don’t allow them to manage you.

With that in mind, then, over the next two days we will take a quick look at five of the main avenues available to you to help generate ideas, experience, and - most important of all - personal insight on the basis of which you will be able to improve your management skills. Please join us!

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Today’s tip: Jared Sandberg’s always intriguing Cubicle Culture column in the WSJ this week is about the frustrations of meetings. And if this is something that particularly attracts your interest, you may also want to review the popular series here on Mastering Meetings.

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