Customize You Education – One Strategy at a Time

The idea that ever person on earth is unique – is surprisingly new in
a management context. It also seems that some organisations are used to
rolling out the same old programmes as all of their competitors, year
after year, to educate their future managers. This realisation is
challenging organisations to rethink how they are approaching customised
education.

Before Crick and Watson discovered DNA – the world was convinced that
we are all exactly the same. It turns out that there are so many
combinations of genetics that we are all literally unique. The second
uniqueness factor is that even if you had exactly the same DNA as
another person, that you would have a different life experience to every
other person on the planet. Management was borne out of the idea that
processes can be controlled and lead to outcomes that are quantifiable
and predictable. The one element that needs to be predictable for
management to work is the contribution or output of the individual.

The theory is quite basic – you set a goal, and the individual is
expected to perform to this goal. If the progress towards the goal is
over or under the target levels – you coach, support and otherwise
inspire the individual to achieve the goal or you find an alternative
way to achieve the same goal.

Some organisations realise that the achievement of these ever growing
goals are highly influenced by the level of support and training given
to an individual. Training and development is a proven way to increase
performance. An increasing number of studies showing that management
attention, training and development and clear direction either inspired
by goal or value based systems form the basis for effective
organisational performance. Individual performance is driven by value
and goal congruence, competence and intrinsic and extrinsic reward
systems.

It is then natural that all organisations should pay attention to how
they are developing their staff. Organisations will typically establish
supervisory, middle and senior and executive development programmes
designed achieved these staff development objectives.

Companies are increasingly realising that employees are not one size
fits all – and that where they are, maybe they should not be. Emerging
trends focus more on innovation, creativity and effective risk taking in
an increasingly regulated environment. It is clear that the standard
development agenda is not producing tomorrow’s leaders and companies are
asking what is wrong with the standard approaches to the leadership
development approaches they have been following. While there is a
discernable return on investment in all training, this return is not
always what was expected.

In tougher economic conditions with increasing pressures to deliver
more with less, there has been a resurgence of the need to find the best
people. The best people are those that will drive innovation in the
organisation and deliver exponentially more through the employment of
new and innovative approaches to business challenges.

At the height of the business process revolution we all believed that
we could just get one more of “those” people. The whole idea that one
more person that does exactly what others does – will make the
difference – seemed to be the best way to grow organisations. It may
then indicate that some people are more suited to deliver a particular
flavour of results, innovation or development in a business and that it
is the task of the organisation to employ people in a specific direction
and make the business work around them. Management is also not premised
on the fact that some people have the information and others do not – so
education must be accessible within an organisation – using the
advantage of technology as far as possible.

The very notion that organisations need to be built around
individuals would seem heretical and could cause the average staid
executive a heart attack. It cannot however be denied that certain
organisations have done this and achieved great results. If Steve Jobs
just ignored the talents of Sir Jony Ive, and took an attitude that said
– we can get another one of these people anywhere in the world – it
could arguably be said would not be using tablets and Apple would not be
have a market capitalisation of $ 400 bn. It however required a lot of
interaction, working together and finding ways to support the
development and genius of one person to make that work.

While it may be interesting to look at the potential of supporting an
individual – we also have to look at how we build the performance of the
overall organisation.

Many times management development has been seen as a short course in
how to dismiss and performance manage people, together with some
training on how to report to your line manager. These get done in a rush
on a Wednesday afternoon because management cannot be taken away from
managing staff. The management development programme is also seen as the
passport to advancement and in some organisations it is an elitist badge
that gets worn by the few who are going to be “higher-ups” soon. Very
few management development programmes look at holistically supporting
the manager to make complex decisions, support and nurture staff,
inspire vision and creativity and build the organisation and deal with
practical issues of organisational development – while still supporting
functional skills such as HR, finance, project management and quality
management.

Some Executive development programmes are even more limited with
managers expected to have acquired skills through years of experience or
through expensive international learning programmes through perceived
top institutes. The challenge is that they learnt how organisations get
managed more effectively but not necessarily in this particular
industry, or using techniques that would be relevant to this market – or
that encapsulates learning from this particular business model.

Executive education should support the strategy of the organisation.
In an ideal world executive education should be seen as a continuous
learning system that supports the organisation to achieve its strategic
objectives through supplying adequate top performing managers to achieve
a competitive advantage.

A popular approach is the leadership pipeline that is seen as a
“building block” approach to executive development. The basic idea is
that a pyramid of skills is acquired initially as a junior manager, then
a middle manager and then as senior manager. These are systematically
delivered and high potentials moved to the next level. Another approach
is the “strategy focused” approach which designs a new programme around
the most critical issue or issues that are facing the company within the
current period (usually a year) and to roll this out widely in order to
support the achievement of specific objectives – possibly at different
levels within an organisation. Another approach is that courses are
developed and centralised for easy deployment and people take it on
themselves to consume the material and that the right “tracks” activate
further development opportunities. Companies that are taking it
seriously are establishing subcommittees of their board to drive
executive education and everyone agrees that top management must use
education as a mechanism to communicate to the organisation.

Increasingly organisations are changing the approach to staff
development to enhance its contribution to the bottom line. Best
practice currently indicates that management development is achieved
through

• Regular development of staff through structured programmes that
  are customised to the specific operating environment of the specific
  organisation.

• Regular review of customised programmes to ensure they are
  aligned to the current goals of the organisation – in as far as possible
  by senior management within the organisation.

• Designing various levels of articulation and progression from one
  level in the organisation to the next and using training as a means to
  support this.

• Capturing practical approaches to real world problems in training
  to aid members in the organisation to deal with practical
  approaches.

• Capturing of feedback from training as a strategic input into the
  organisation.

• Integrating training, learning and new ideas into daily
  operational activities.

• Having flexible frameworks that covers the curriculum required
  but that can also take into consideration of individual or group needs
  that are not standard.

• Supporting training through repeatable simulations, coaching and
  executive mentorship approaches.

• Sourcing and documenting internal case studies that teach
  operating methods and that codifies internal learning.

• As far as possible, executive and management development
  programmes should be available to all staff.

• Being able to link these, where relevant, to people achieving
  actual qualifications.

some providers have been very active in this type of education with
organisations constantly requesting executive education and custom
programmes to achieve specific organisational objectives. This together
with effective monitoring and evaluation forms the basis strong
partnerships between a business school and an organisation that wants to
create excellence through training and development.

Conclusion

Executive and management development is a critical dimension in the
modern organisation to achieve top performance in a demanding
marketplace. Just as even organisation is unique, so is every
individual. Many organisations are suffering from staid approaches to
training and development that limit people and the organisation from
achieving their full potential. New approaches are necessary that take
into consideration the strategic objectives of the organisation and that
supports this with inspiration, innovation and new approaches to
learning that enhances individual and group performance in a two-way
organisational conversation.