Developing management and leadership skills in others – 5: teaching management skills

This is my fifth installment in a series on developing management and leadership skills in others (see HR and Personnel, postings 81-84 for parts 1-4), and I turn in it from the issues of mentoring and building a mentorship supportive corporate culture per se, to the specific issues of training others in management skills. My next posting in this series after this one will consider leadership training. And after that I will post on teaching mentoring skills themselves, and on training managers and leaders to be effective mentors too, to bring this discussion full circle.

• The best management oriented mentoring is very here and now focused, and oriented towards capturing the lessons-learned potential of the moment – clarifying, prioritizing and resolving real world challenges currently faced.
• That does not mean that good advice should be or is entirely ad hoc or applicable only to an immediate circumstance, though. An important part of hands-on management training is in helping a less experienced colleague more readily discern when a novel, none-of-the-above approach might be needed.
• A lot of what a mentor shares that offers lasting value is generalizable, and helps the mentee to build a skills and experience foundation to work from.
• I return to the first bullet point, above, with that to stress the importance of real world applicability. Abstract lessons can offer value but only when there is sufficient leavening from real-world experience to translate them from the abstract to the directly here-and-now applicable.

With that I note that mentoring is only one approach for learning or for training in management skills, and understanding its role and value means considering it as it fits into this wider context.

• A lot of businesses offer employee training and that often includes options for picking up more basic, first-time management skills. But course work and certainly online and self-paced/automated programs with their multiple choice test questions do not offer focused, immediate feedback or insight in a way that working with a mentor in your own business can.
• I add into consideration online groups and the discussions and sharing of insight that they bring in this, and I do recommend crowd sourcing for insight that comes from a wider perspective of sources too. But even with that included, most online and standard management training courses can at most only provide a partial solution to the issues and challenges of training next generation managers.
• And I add that these programs and courses generally offer entry level management training only, and not middle-management or more senior management guidance. Mentors are essential there as management training at a higher level benefits from and even requires a more personalized focus.
• And I add that regardless of level taught at, most courses are fairly industry-agnostic and while that can be a positive, it can leave important areas untouched for any given manager in training and certainly as they seek to learn the skills needed for working more effectively in their specific industry or business-type.
• Organized courses can and do offer value. Peer discussion, face to face or online offers real value too. But even taken together, mentoring still can fill critical gaps. And the networking and connections building that mentoring engenders can offer value that lasts beyond any explicit mentoring-based training too, and in ways that supplement and complement other and more general business networking.

What of business degrees? The back story of the MBA is insightful in that regard. There was a time when having an MBA in and of itself meant higher salary and a higher position on the table of organization, with these increases coming fairly automatically for employees who successfully complete a degree program. More importantly here, this bump came to new gradates who did not have the leavening of real world business experience too, with their starting at a significantly higher average salary than their non-Masters degreed peers. Then businesses came to see that new MBAs who lacked real world experience did not bring that expected value with them from having their advanced degree. And this filtered back to the business schools that offered these degree programs, and they began to rigorously require real business experience as a program entry requirement; the last thing they wanted was to graduate new MBAs who would not be able to find employment commensurate with the costs and effort of gaining the degree for lack of marketplace-required credentials.

Partly this real world leavening means hands-on working and on a day to day basis in real businesses and marketplaces. But this also means learning from the experience and insight of others, and in the immediate context of the workplace where any advice or insight would be immediately validated or disproven by empirical experience.

And I finish this posting by noting, as stated in earlier postings, that mentoring should not always be from older mentor to younger mentee. And I cite a specific area where this can be crucially important in management training. Older managers who grew up looking at computers strictly as desktop or larger hardware, and who do not think in terms of everywhere and all the time connected of younger generations, need help in bridging the gap and in learning how to work with generation X and generation Y employees. Articulate and patient members of these new and advancing generations can provide essential management insight for working with these employees that can in fact be more valuable for a senior manager than their picking up new hands-on technology skills. And it is where younger mentor older, that the most overall value to the business can be found in this – and of a type that is specifically not going to be covered in management training courses offered through a business, or in general.

As I noted above, the next installment in this series will focus on mentoring and the development of leadership skills. You can find this series and related postings at HR and Personnel and further related postings at Business Strategy and Operations and its continuation page at Business Strategy and Operations – 2.

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