Developing Managers

MANAGER DEVELOPMENT A THREEFOLD RESPONSIBILITY

TO ENTERPRIS

E

TO THE INDIVIDUA

L

TO SOCIETY

Manager cannot make rational and responsible decisions.

Unless it selects, develops and tests the men who will have to follow them through-the managers of tomorrow.

Tomorrow’s senior positions will be filled by men who today occupy junior positions.

Management today has to be able to handle many new “relations” problem

Government

Suppliers

CustomersEmployees

Labour Unions

By offering challenges and opportunities for the individual development.

The enterprise discharges, in part, the obligation to make a job in industry a “way of life.”

What is needed is the development of managers equal to the tasks of tomorrow, not the tasks of yesterday.

What is needed is the development of managers equal to the tasks of tomorrow, not the tasks of yesterday.

---- Ralph

J. Cordiner

President of General Electric

PRINCIPLES OF MANAGER DEVELOPMENT

The first principle of manager development must therefore be the development of the entire management group.

Less time, less money and less energy would probably be needed to improve the performance of managers.

The second principle is that manager development must be dynamic.

It must never aim at replacing what is today-today’s managers, their jobs, or their qualification.

It must always focus on the needs of tomorrow.

What business needs is not engineer with a smattering of accounting. They needs engineers capable of managing a business.

One does not become broader by seeing the business as a whole.

A man should never be given a job that is not a real job, that does not require performance from him.

Manager Development must embrace all managers in the enterprise.

It must aim at challenging all to growth and self-development.

It must focus on performance rather than on promise, and n tomorrow’s requirements rather than on those of today.

HOW TO DEVELOP MANAGERSThe job of developing tomorrow’s managers

is both too big and too important to be considered a special activity.

No amount of special manager-development activities will, for instance, develop tomorrow’s managers in an organisation that focuses on weakness and fears strength.

For development is always self-development.

Nothing could be more absurd than for the enterprise to assume responsibility for the development of a man

The responsibility rests with the individual, his abilities, his efforts

No business enterprise is competent, let alone obligated, to substitute its efforts for the self development efforts of the individual.

The first job is an individual one.

Each manager should think through what each man under him is capable of doing.

THIS ANALYSIS LEADS TO TWO QUESTIONS:

Is the man placed in the job where he can make the greatest contribution to the company?

What does he have to learn, what weakness does he have to overcome to be able to realize fully his strengths and capacities?

When the right job becomes available, it should be staffed on the basis of the analyses of the development needs of the individual managers.

These are of course life-and-death decisions.

“Manager Manpower planning” then checks on the adequacy of the company’s individual manager development effort in the light of tomorrow’s management jobs and their demands.

Manager manpower planning starts with the analysis of the future needs of the company and its objectives.

The really important plan is the long term one-five or ten years ahead.

Most management have found out that demand for good people is increasing faster than the capacity of even a successful manager-development program to supply them.

The best performers in any profession always look upon the men they have trained and developed as the proudest monument they can leave behind