Supporting Management Self Development

This article consists of four parts. The first part describes some of the forces in management and society in general which are supporting the move towards self‐developmental approaches to education and training. The second part suggests that managerial competencies and skills generally come about not through formal training but as a result of self developmental processes. Following this is a brief description of management self development — what it is and what it means in practice. The final section of the paper discusses the need for support in the self development process and suggests that support groups of learning communities go some way towards meeting this need.