MANAGEMENT TRAINING
If
the course was meant to be in general management why then should you become a stakeholder
when the company doesn't subscribe to it? Being a stakeholder means that someone has
penned themselves into a mode of working which doesn't have a gate built into it.
If there is a difference between personal and company growth, it ends up a splintered training strategy. For example, before and after attending a course does the company encourage its implementation? Does everyone gather with their peers and plan their training as a group - taking into account their own requirements?
Also does the person going on the course afterwards do a presentation to show the benefits for the company to make them policy (lack of the Personnel Depts initiative here), instead of relying heavy on consultants. So that the learning can go from:
- artificial to meaningful.
- inappropriate to on target.
- too hard to a tailored module.
Also the knowledge of this feedback and its value would become tangible to the person as well as the company.
Question why the company is sending a person on a course in the first instance and not just a nice day trip for sight seeing. If the course hasn't any benefits to you and the company in the short-term then have a course in mind that would be which has a purpose and is practical.
Staying in the back of anyone's mind in storage sounds to me like the wind; you never know which direction it's coming from until you take your finger out and by that time its passed you.
The worst is having a knowledge database with nothing on it because no one is participating. No reviews of training is the same as no case studies of market evaluation so there's no company history nor the employees contributions written down....there goes a tumble weed.
A training course is only as good as the person who is teaching it and the contents of the material. It should create a dialogue between employer and employees. If it hasn't then it isn't working.
For example, I disagree with Henry Mintzberg that "...we should be developing real managers, not pretending to create them in the classroom..."
When a person is in training, it doesn't stop at a location or a time, its work in progress. So "real" is the manager's own standards and expectations not a lecturer's. Also "pretending" is another way of learning a skill. Or does he forget his own training as an engineer started with a pretense called imagination which can also be deemed a classroom.
I agree, that "...management or leadership training is all about making people better people..." However sometimes its not by those who have gained the position and title of manager and nor do they always work in Human Resources.
In management training its also the importance of rumination which is vital to any training programme in the aspect of understanding as well as its application.
If managers are never trained properly in the first place, how are they to look for long term fiscal results if their thinking can only function in the here and now. So its no wonder there is poor performance in the workplace.
The effectiveness of management has become so theorised that the actual skill has become sidelined to accommodate "yes people" in companies who haven't a clue about their own destiny more less a company's.
Management training is not fixed and it needs to leave room for others to develop their own management style, which might work better. However, because its safer to think a technique has proven once before by someone else has tested its effectiveness, this limits the motivation not only to lead and manage others, but also a manager's own growth potential to evolve. This is what makes management an "art".
Manager's and CEOs look in hindsight but don't function better for it, because if these techniques were proven, we wouldn't necessarily be having the dilemma of the management confidence in their ability to manage employees and administration and their careers.
For companies, managers and CEO from the past aren't here to see if their theories were proven and the results benefited the companies in the long term. If they had one. Also it doesn't so much matter that some of those managers don't exist today. They helped start the ball rolling by being competitive in the marketplace in the first instance. The best managed companies don't exist yet.
If a person doesn't look around or take a step back to think how are they supposed to learn and ask questions. So managers are told so they do, no?
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