Getting started: Topic 5 meeting management training needs

This article follows the one in the October issue in which I described a simple but effective method of defining management training needs. Just as that article attacked the popular assumption that the greatest needs are for management techniques, this one will challenge the view that courses are the main, if not the only, road to salvation. The needs you will have diagnosed will be for things like better self‐organisation, better delegation, better group effectiveness and better decision‐making. As with swimming, the abstract principles can be rehearsed in a classroom, but they can be learned only in a real situation. Coaching, sometimes of individuals, sometimes of teams, is the only alternative to leaving improvement to chance. Development activities, therefore, must be in‐company and must use real problems as the basic teaching medium. In this way, the organisation is developed at the same time as the manager. The usual divorce of management training from questions of organisation and the ineffectiveness of courses account for the frequent failures of management training.