You wouldn't expect the Universities and Business schools to agree but the business case for funding managers on MBAs just doesn't stack up. It's not just the escalating costs but the lack of return on investmentfor the organisation. An MBA may help the individual’s career but it does little for the organisation. Yet management development has never been more crucial with a demanding agenda of change to deliver in a climate of budget cuts, rising consumer demand, low staff moral and a tense political environment. So what’s the answer? For the same amount of money as sending two or three people on a MBA course each year you can run an executive coaching programme, management learning sets and support to an organisation wide management mentoring scheme.This isn’t to say there is not a place for formal management training/ qualifications, but we have moved on from the idea that we can improve the quality of management by simply requiring all managers to have a formal management qualification. We all benefit from time out to think about the big issues, to become more strategic in our thinking and to be exposed to new ideas and theories. But you don’t need to go on a MBA course to get this. Management learning sets which bring together managers from different organisations can achieve the same.Organisations increasingly require managers to have good people skills, to have the insight into how their own behaviour affects colleagues and those they manage. This is best achieved through one to one coaching and the use of 360 degree feedback. Executive coaching involves managers being observed in a range of work activates, giving a presentation, holding a team meeting, chairing a working group, participating in multi agency negotiations, undertaking an appraisal session. The coach gives direct feedback to the individual following each observation and links this to the material derived from a 360 degree feedback obtained from a range of direct reports, colleagues, and line manager. This is powerful information as managers rarely get independent feedback on their performance/ interactions. An organisation needs to know the type of manager it wants. Once this has been established there needs to be an investment in management development for aspiring managers, newly appointed managers and managers who have been in the same post a little bit too long. An in house programme will be quicker and cheaper at achieving the critical mass sufficient to change the organisations culture and deliver the change agenda within the government ambitious time scale.Blair McPherson is author of Equipping managers for an uncertain future published by Russell House which contains a detailed case study of how a large local authority introduced the type of management leadership programme described in this article.
