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What is Management Development?
Anyone with responsibility for organising resources or people is a manager. That is, anyone from supervisors to chief executives. There are at least as many definitions of management development as there are books on the subject. Generally, however, it is taken to cover the entire structured process by which managers learn and improve their skills for the benefit of their employing organisations and themselves. The word 'structured' is important because, like everyone else, managers learn all the time from experience - from doing their jobs. Only if that informal learning is picked up or used in some kind of formal process should it be counted as management development.
So Management Development includes:
- structured informal learning: work-based methods aimed at structuring the informal learning which will always take place
- formal training courses of various kinds: from very specific courses on technical aspects of jobs to courses on wider management skills
- education: which might range from courses for junior managers or supervisors to Master of Business Administration (MBA) degrees.
What do we mean by Management?
The term 'leadership' is often used almost interchangeably with 'management', but leadership is different.: whereas management is about rational thinking, leadership appeals more to the emotions. However, leadership is an important component of management.
Much of what is written about management development focuses on large organisations, public or private, and on senior managers - future business leaders. But managers at all levels, need to be developed. Similarly, small firms are not simply smaller versions of big companies and they have different priorities and needs: for example, some are less likely to see the need for management development, they may have fewer resources to devote to it, their managers have to be more multi-functional, and they may need to learn in different ways.
