The AMA Guide to Management Development

337 Pages·2008·0.86 MB·English

by  Daniel R. Tobin Ph.D.

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The AMA Guide
to Management
Development
Daniel R. Tobin
Margaret S. Pettingell
American Management Association
New York • Atlanta • Brussels • Chicago • Mexico City
San Francisco • Shanghai • Tokyo • Toronto • Washington, D. C.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tobin, Daniel R., 1946–
The AMA guide to management development / Daniel R. Tobin, Margaret
S. Pettingill
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-8144-0899-5
1. Management—Study and teaching. 2. Executives—Training of.
3. Leadership—Study and teaching. 4. Mentoring in business. 5. Core
competencies. 6. Career development. I. Pettingell, Margaret S. II. Title.
HD30.4.T63 2008
658.4(cid:2)07124—dc22
2008001434
© 2008 AMACOM, a division of
American Management Association.
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
This publication may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
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permission of AMACOM, a division of American Management Association,
1601 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.
Printing number
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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Contents
Foreword by Pat Leonard
EVP, American Management Association v
Introduction 1
CHAPTER 1
Starting with the End in Mind 7
CHAPTER 2
Competence: The Ability to Do Something Well 27
CHAPTER 3
The AMA Management Development Competency
Model: Knowing and Managing Yourself 49
CHAPTER 4
The AMA Management Development Competency
Model: Knowing and Managing Others 77
CHAPTER 5
The AMA Management Development Competency
Model: Knowing and Managing the Business 117
CHAPTER 6
Selecting for Competence 165
CHAPTER 7
Developing Employees 177
CHAPTER 8
Management Development Beyond Training 195
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iv Contents
CHAPTER 9
The Role of the Manager/Employee Relationship 211
CHAPTER 10
The Role of the Organizational Leadership 227
CHAPTER 11
The Role of the Human Resources Group 241
CHAPTER 12
The Role of the Training Group 253
CHAPTER 13
The Future of Management Development 267
APPENDIX
The AMA Management Development Competency
Model 277
Endnotes 323
Index 327
A PDF file of the AMA Management Development
Compentency Model, as well as other information about
the book, is available at:
www.amacombooks.org/go/AMAGuideMgmtDevelop
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Foreword
For the last 85 years, AMA has been successfully developing managers.
More than 160,000 people a year will go through our seminar programs
worldwide, through open enrollment forums or through customized so-
lutions delivered on site. Companies trust us with their talent, and we
take their trust seriously. We concentrate on providing superior pro-
grams, webcasts, podcasts, research, and books.
Successful development of managers in your organization involves
much more than sending people to a training program. It requires new
roles for the organization’s leaders, the human resources function, the
internal training group, and for all employees and managers in the or-
ganization. This book provides expert guidance on actions you can take
today to improve your management development processes, no matter
the size of your organization, your location, or your industry.
The traditional scope of duties and influence of expanding manage-
ment responsibilities are constantly changing, but our model will give
you a guide for your journey. With this core you can then further
sharpen or customize the model to align competency priorities that are
important for your business. Then you can craft a development model
that aligns those priorities with the kind of contributions employees
make as their own sphere of influence expands from individual contrib-
utor, to manager of others, to managing the business. Your own man-
agement development plan for your team will be shaped by the role
and responsibility of each team member, his or her contribution, and
how it ties to your corporate goal.
Once you know your ultimate goal, you can begin to plan. What
skills do your people need to possess in order to get the job done and
move your business forward? What capacities do they need to be really
strong? In what roles do they need to excel, as part of the mosaic of
contributions they make individually and as part of the team effort of
doing business?
This is not a recipe book. Crafting a management development
strategy and execution plan is not that simple. This is work, and you
need a plan. You need to stick to the plan and be ruthless about devel-
oping your people to meet the needs of your business AND take them
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vi Foreword
to the next level of professional development. You owe it to your com-
pany. You owe it to your employees. You owe it to yourself as a man-
ager. Blissful is that state when all your employees are engaged, aligned,
pulling in the same, agreed direction, contributing to the discussion,
and anticipating the company’s needs.
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where....,” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
In the words of the Cheshire Cat, where are you going? What do you
want to achieve? What talents do you need on board to accomplish
your goals, personal or organizational, and how do those ingredients
need to come together to achieve that end? Unlike Alice, we trust that
you care...otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this book. It does mat-
ter “which way you go” on this journey, and as you will read, there are
many factors to consider. Trust in us, in AMA, to give you a guide,
steeped in experience, positive in outcome, that will get you where you
want to go.
Pat Leonard
Executive Vice President
American Management Association
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Introduction
Over the past eighty-five years, the American Management Associa-
tion (AMA) has delivered thousands of seminars to millions of par-
ticipants across the globe. It is rare for us to attend any business
gathering without meeting people with fond memories of an AMA pro-
gram they attended sometime in their career, while many tell us of
AMA programs that were important milestones that shaped their career
progress.
For example, when Dan Tobin joined AMA several years ago, he
spoke with an uncle who retired fifteen years earlier from a sweater
manufacturer, where he worked his way up from office manager to
company CEO. He said that over the span of forty years he attended
half a dozen AMA seminars, and that they ranged from very good to
outstanding, and that all were important milestones in his career pro-
gression. AMA’s CEO, Ed Reilly, recently met a Fortune 500 CEO
who told him that early in his career he had attended an AMA seminar
on strategic planning, and by using what he learned in that seminar he
accelerated his journey from a young marketing manager to eventually
becoming the company’s CEO.
For years, AMA’s corporate customers have repeatedly asked us
two questions:
• What is AMA’s competency model for individual professionals,
first-level managers, and mid-level managers?
• How can our organization best develop its employees so that we
have a ready supply of future management and leadership talent to
grow our organization?
This book will help answer those questions.
In AMA’s history there were attempts to answer the competency
question with rudimentary competency models and a concept we called
“learning paths.” This is not to say that there was no information on the
subject generally available. There are many competency models to be
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2 AMA Guidebook to Management Development
found in the worldwide management literature, from consulting and
training firms, business school professors, and training pundits, as well
as hundreds or thousands of company-specific competency models
developed over the past decades. And there are tens of thousands
of books offering management advice from hundreds of publishers
around the world, including AMACOM, AMA’s own book publishing
operation.
Starting two years ago, AMA’s portfolio management group, which is
responsible for defining AMA’s program offerings, led an organization-
wide effort to define an AMA competency model for individual pro-
fessionals, first-level managers, mid-level managers, and functional
managers. This research examined a number of models that existed in
the public domain, including many of the well-researched competen-
cies developed by the Lominger organization, the U.S. Government
Office of Personnel Management (OPM), and the UK Management
Standards Centre. In this book, we further categorized these competen-
cies into three broad categories, those that deal with:
• Knowing and managing yourself.
• Knowing and managing others.
• Knowing and managing the business.
Please note that even for individual professionals, both those who
aspire to climb the management ladder and those who plan to stay in
individual roles, there are important competencies required in all three
of these categories, for even if an individual professional will never
“manage the business,” he or she still needs to have some business
knowledge and acumen.
The AMA Management Development Competency Model, as pre-
sented in this book, is not meant to be the be-all and end-all of compe-
tency models, but it provides a realistic framework of competencies on
which to base your organization’s management development efforts.
Because competencies are general in nature, there can be lengthy de-
bate on what to call a given competency, or whether a particular com-
petency is more or less important for individuals at a given level of the
organization, or whether your organization’s culture puts greater or
lesser emphasis on some competencies as compared with others. These
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Introduction 3
discussions and debates are a good sign that your organization is think-
ing about the importance of developing its management talent to en-
sure its success.
The second question, “How should our organization develop its
managers?,” has no one right answer. If there were a single correct an-
swer, there would be one theory, one book, one training program, and
one guru on the subject, rather than the thousands that you can find in
today’s market. This book does not present an outline of a specific
training program for managers, but rather offers advice on what your
organization needs to do to be effective at developing the managers
(through training and many other development methods) who will keep
your organization running today and growing tomorrow.
The responsibility for developing managers cannot be left solely to
your organization’s training group. It is one of our objections to the
popularity of “corporate universities” that in too many organizations
that have established such entities, managers now feel freed from their
responsibilities to develop their employees—“I don’t have to worry
about that any more because we have the corporate university to han-
dle it.” As described in this book, there are vital roles in management
development for the organization’s executives, the human resources
group, the training group, and most importantly, managers and their
employees. Without the active participation in and support of manage-
ment development of all these groups, you will not get maximum value
from any development initiative you undertake.
Evaluation of training efforts has become an increasingly hot topic
over the years as training organizations try to justify their expenditures
on employee training. Most books on training use the last chapter to
discuss evaluation methods. We start this book with evaluation. Chap-
ter 1, “Starting with the End in Mind,” posits that if you plan your man-
agement development efforts well, by tying all such efforts to specific
organizational, group, and individual business goals, their value to your
organization will be self-evident and you will never be asked to justify
the expense post facto.
In Chapters 2 through 5, we present the AMA Management Devel-
opment Competency Model. Chapter 2, “Competence: The Ability to
Do Something Well,” defines competence, discusses distinctions between
“management competencies” and “leadership competencies,” and pro-
vides background information on the process we used to develop the
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