Many people think that management development is something that happens to them. But successful managers don't just go in one end of a training pipeline and come out the other as a manager. There are two key things to bear in mind:

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	Jim Stroup

1. You are responsible for your development as a manager and for your career. Not your boss, not the HR department, not the most "cutting-edge" MBA program or consultant-designed education program. You.
   
   
2. To develop, you must practice management. Management development isn't a passive process wherein you attend a class, read a book, or sit through a workshop, and then collect your attendance certificate and go back to work to claim your promotion. You get ideas, glean insights from others' experience, and develop some useful conceptual frameworks at such events. But you develop as a manger by managing.

Learn from every source available to you: listen, read, even take classes. But then decide for yourself what makes sense, test it in your own management work, learn from your real-life experience with it, and build on that experience to improve.

As you gather information such as this, bear in mind the following three forms that it can take:

1. Research. Academic institutions and large consultancies spend a lot of time and effort trying to understand all aspects of work — especially management. They then present these in formal courses of education, workshops, or other presentations. While there is a lot of chaff out there, there is also a lot of wheat. Learning how to distinguish between the two is as important as benefiting from the good research.
   
   
2. Others' experience. Many formal study programs are based on surveys of managers' careers and perceptions. Others may be presented or facilitated by managers or those who advise them. Again, the judgment of such people is far from infallible, but you will gain much from seeing how they perceive and evaluate their experiences.
   
   
3. Working models. Many conceptual frameworks have been developed to describe management methods. These are useful intellectual tools to help you organize information and evidence into a context that makes sense of what you see happening around you. Be careful, though, to avoid becoming overly enamored of any particular tool — use them to help you understand and manage your work; don't allow them to manage you.

With that in mind, then, let's take a quick look at five of the main avenues available to you to help generate ideas, experience, and — most important of all — personal insight, on the basis of which you will be able to improve your management skills.

Study

This can range from formal academic programs, such as an MBA program, to informal presentations like workshops, seminars, or conferences. Much of this kind of training is provided by an employer either on or off site. Many companies will also underwrite part or all of an outside formal program.

These can be helpful for you in all three of the areas listed above. Just bear in mind that however accessible, or even inexpensive due to company-provided tuition support, they suffer two handicaps: (1) they still consume a large amount of your time, and (2) they teach, but they don't train.

Organizational programs

Many companies provide their own professionally designed and specially tailored management development programs. These are a very good choice where available, as they are less academic and more directed at producing results in the workplace. However, they are still largely a teaching, rather than a training, device.

Of special interest is mentoring programs, which pair young managers with senior executives who provide both advice in specific situations and general career guidance. You can learn a great deal from the "others' experience" category, including how to assess the products of the other two.

Maintain your personal boundaries in such relationships; you want to be more of a student of your mentor than an acolyte. As in other management development methods, be open-minded and objective, and then compare what you learn with your own thinking and experience.

Reading

There are four key things to bear in mind regarding your reading program:

1. Read constantly. You should always be reading something, and have something lined up to read next.
   
   
2. Don't be overawed by an author's credentials or a book's sales ranking. The truth is that a vast amount of business and management writing is awful. As in everything else, it is up to you not only to find the wheat among all the chaff, but to learn to recognize both for what they are.
   
   
3. Read business and management books anyway. Your bosses are reading them. Your mentors and other sources of information are reading them.
   
   
4. Read outside of your field. This is important. Absolutely do not restrict your reading to business and management. Read everything: history, science, biography, travel, fiction. You will find you learn more about management from this aspect of your reading than from the business and management books on your list. But read from both broad categories.

Observation

As you do all of the foregoing, you will be arming yourself to become a keen observer of the managers around you. Be aggressive about this: there can hardly be a better laboratory than the firm, or better experiments than the actual ways management is practiced by managers.

Anchor your observations to results. As you do this, set the concepts and frameworks aside for a moment and just assess the management actions and styles you see in terms of how they meet organizational goals or based on the particular targets assigned by the managers you are observing. Consider also their effects on organizational morale and endurance.

Be alert to what you can learn from negative examples. Often, careful consideration of them can teach much more, of more lasting value, than all the rest combined.

Application

Most important of all, use what you've been learning. This is how you really become a better manager. The key issue here is to get effective feedback. Try to find objective performance data about unit performance, employee morale, and employees successes in their careers.

Routinely ask your seniors and your mentor for their assessments. Ask for formal evaluations even more frequently than your company's scheduled reviews. If necessary, rotate these between your immediate boss and your mentor. You can consult with peers, too; it may be more effective to do this with your network contacts in other firms.

But the keys are these: (1) your management development program comes down to you practicing what you've determined is relevant and valuable from all your varied sources of learning, and then (2) obtaining and reflecting on the feedback your management initiatives generate so that you can reinforce good practices, improve others, and jettison still others.

In this way you will train yourself to become a manager who knows how to apply theory to the demands of work. Moreover, you will become adept at doing so in the midst of a dynamic, collaborative, social environment, developing and deploying assets for both your work and career among your employees, peers, and seniors.

That, after all, is what managers do. And this is how you learn to do it.

About the Author

Jim Stroup is an international management consultant specializing in organizational leadership and strategic planning. Learn more at www.managingleadership.com/blog.

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