Managing Management Development

How important is management development to organisations? How can it be managed so as to provide most benefit? why do management development activities frequently miss their mark? Graham Mole presents a practitioner's approach to management development in organisations. There is a strong emphasis on the practical applications of development techniques such as appraisal, assessment and 360 degree feedback, and vignettes and examples are drawn both from the author's own experience and from others' research. Management development is a well-trodden and increasingly lucrative field in which large numbers of managers, developers, consultants, academic institutions and others play. It deserves to be done well; but this book highlights critically the differences between management development as it is commonly construed and packaged and an approach which properly takes account of relevant organisational theory and research. It is argued that one needs to understand organisational power systems, business requirements, managerial jobs and individual characteristics in order to successfully design, build and integrate management development initiatives. This book poses challenging questions both for those involved or interested in management development in their own and others' organisations, and for students of business and organisational behaviour.

Table of Contents:
Introduction Management development long history, short change? The management development agenda Management development needs 1 the organizational level Management development needs 2 the job level Management development needs 3 the individual level Managers learning some useful theories, some questionable rhetoric Selecting, designing and evaluating management development interventions Some alternative perspectives, some final reflections Appendix accessing and using competencies for management development References Index.

About the Author :
Graham Mole is Director of Human Resources Development for Willis, a global risk management firm, where he is primarily engaged in senior management assessment, development and succession planning. After leaving college in 1969 he began his career as a management trainee with Unilever, and has also worked in the mining and pharmaceutical industries. In 1993 he obtained an MSc in Organizational Behaviour from Birkbeck College, University of London, where he based the subject of his research project on management competencies. He is now working towards a PhD thesis at Birkbeck on how managers handle conflict at work. He has been involved academically in training and development as a tutor, external examiner and recently as a critical reader for the Open University's 'Managing Human Resources' programme.