The AMA Guide to Management Development

Overview

From the experts at the American Management Association, an indispensable look at how great organizations can make the most of their managers.

Based on the set of managerial competencies specially developed by the American Management Association for a new core management curriculum, The AMA Guide to Management Development provides readers with a comprehensive understanding of how to continually develop managers throughout their entire organization. The book considers every factor important in management development, and features in-depth information on topics including:

• The five major categories of competencies, including business knowledge and the ability to lead and manage change and innovation

• The specific skills needed, including communication skills and people management skills

• Alternative methods organizations may use to develop managers, including different types of training and evaluation of learning effectiveness

Management development is a crucial task for every enterprise. This book gives readers the guidance they need to make sure that both current and future managers have the abilities their organizations need to prosper.

About the Author

Daniel R. Tobin (Stamford, CT) is Vice President of Instructional Design and Development for the American Management Association (AMA) and has more than 30 years' experience as a corporate training director, consultant, writer, and speaker on corporate learning strategies.

Margaret S. Pettingell (Hillsborough, NJ) is is an instructional designer with AMA. She previously held positions with Novations Group, Accenture, and Decker Communications.

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There is no shortage of great resources for developing high-level executive talent in your company. But perhaps better than any other professional training and development organization, the American Management Association understands an equally pressing need: the need to equip your first-, second-, and third-level managers with the unique competencies and skills they need to help their staffs accomplish the daily work that powers your company to strong results and sustained growth.

Through years of exhaustive research, extensive field testing, and the analysis of literally hundreds of competency models, the AMA and authors Tobin and Pettingell have distilled into one authoritative volume the "best of the best? in management development. Developed by leading thinkers and deployed in organizations around the world, the competencies and skills identified here represent a broad spectrum of key approaches applicable to both typical and unusual business settings.

There are common competencies that managers at all levels must have and develop, and there are also competencies unique (or at least proportionally more crucial) to each specific level of management. In both cases, management competencies tend to fit into one of three general classifications:

Knowing and managing yourself

Knowing and managing others

Knowing and managing the business

Depending on the particular roles and goals of the individual manager, the degree or number of required competencies in each category will vary; but every manager operates to some degree within those three combined contexts. The AMA Guide to Management Development gives you a practical structure of competencies to work from. How you build on that structure will depend on the company's particular needs in each area, and the structure is flexibly designed to encourage the identification, discussion, and meeting of your organization's uniquely ideal management development strategy.

This book places an emphasis on the idea that training and development must not be left solely to training and development groups, corporate universities, or external consultants. To relieve everyday managers of their duties in self- or staff development is to alienate those managers from the very core of their responsibility to develop their employees. The AMA Guide to Management Development offers a framework for keeping managers deeply involved in competency development, whereby they will be that much better equipped to ensure the success of any training initiatives the company may undertake. In fact, an entire chapter is devoted to illustrating why the manager-employee relationship is the single most important factor in the development process, the relationship without which all other development efforts will fall short. You'll see clearly the responsibilities required of organizational leadership, human resources, and training professionals, all against the backdrop of the daily, pro-active development efforts of managers and supervisors.

Finally, the AMA Management Development Competency Model itself is presented in its entirety, with hundreds of illustrative behaviors spread across nearly four dozen competencies as they apply to positions at four different employee and management levels. Using this model and the guidance provided throughout the book, you will optimize every aspect of your management development efforts, from screening and hiring to sustained talent management, from individual reporting relationships to formal, company-wide management development initiatives.

Daniel R. Tobin is Vice President of Instructional Design and Development for the American Management Association and has more than 30 years of experience as a corporate training director, consultant, writer, and speaker on corporate learning strategies. Margaret S. Pettingell is an instructional designer with AMA, and previously held positions with Novations Group, Accenture, and Decker Communications.

Your first- through third-level managers are the guts of your organization. It's crucial that these managers have powerful development efforts behind them and their employees. But what exactly does your company need to develop in each manager? Is there one competency model that goes point-by-point through every parameter of effective management development?

Actually, there are hundreds of such models, each valid in its own right but perhaps exclusive of other equally sound models. The AMA Guide to Management Development takes the very best in cutting-edge management development thinking and synthesizes it into one comprehensive and practical plan to help you identify and address your company's unique needs and establish the ideal balance of specific skills, management acumen, and leadership qualities at each and every manager's position.

Distilled from the unparalleled resources of the American Management Association, this guide reflects years of real-world application and untold hours of research and analysis, resulting in a first-of-its-kind strategic business tool for developing current and future management and leadership talent in any organization.

"The AMA Guide to Management Development by Daniel Tobin and Margaret Pettingell is a valuable resource full of best practices for uncovering management potential in your employees.?

--Ken Blanchard, co-author of The One Minute Manager® and The One Minute Entrepreneur?

"The AMA Guide to Management Development, is an exceptional new source of valuable information and insights for all management [development] professionals.?— Robert H. Bloom, U.S. CEO Publicis Worldwide, Retired, and author of The Inside Advantage: The Strategy That Unlocks the Growth In Your Business

"Dan Tobin and Margaret Pettingell truly 'get it' when it comes to training and developing managers. Their concepts, techniques, and case examples are presented in easy to understand language. Following their wisdom and practical guidance will allow the reader to take great strides in closing the gap between learning and business results, maximize the effectiveness of all employees, and leverage training to enhance employee engagement while meeting the needs of the business."—Jim Kirkpatrick, Ph.D., SMR USA,VP, Global Training and Consulting, and co-author of Evaluating Training Programs: The Four Levels

"Tobin and Pettingell have masterfully synthesized and integrated the complex and often confusing domain of management and leadership development. They offer a pragmatic and useful typology of competencies leaders require, then offer specific suggestions for how to develop those competencies. This work is a compendium of insights that defines the DNA of leadership. It will become a resource guide for anyone serious about being or building better leadership.?—Dave Ulrich, Professor, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, coauthor, Leadership Brand

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Excerpt

Introduction

Over the past eighty-five years, the American Management Association (AMA) has delivered thousands of seminars to millions of participants across the globe. It is rare for us to attend any business gathering without meeting people with fond memories of an AMA program 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 progression. 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 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 professionals, 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 competencies 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 competencies 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 presented in this book, is not meant to be the be-all and end-all of competency 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 debate on what to call a given competency, or whether a particular competency 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 discussions and debates are a good sign that your organization is thinking about the importance of developing its management talent to ensure its success.

The second question, "How should our organization develop its managers?,? has no one right answer. If there were a single correct answer, 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 handle 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 management 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. Chapter 1, "Starting with the End in Mind,? posits that if you plan your management 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 Development Competency Model. Chapter 2, "Competence: The Ability to Do Something Well,? defines competence, discusses distinctions between "management competencies? and "leadership competencies,? and provides background information on the process we used to develop the AMA Management Development Competency Model. Chapter 3 covers those AMA competencies that deal with knowing and managing yourself, while Chapter 4 describes those included in the category of knowing and managing others, and Chapter 5 defines those related to knowing and managing the business (whatever business your organization may be in).

In seeking people with a given set of competencies, organizations always have the options to either buy those competencies (hire employees who already possess the needed competencies) or build them within the organization's current employee base. Chapter 6, "Selecting for Competence,? discusses how to screen external or internal candidates for specific competencies. Chapter 7 deals with employee learning, both self-directed learning and training provided by the organization. Chapter 8 discusses a wide range of options for developing management competencies that fall outside the realm of formal training programs.

Knowing the competencies needed for effective management, and understanding how to develop those competencies, will not get your organization very far unless the right people in the organization step up to take responsibility for management development. In Chapter 9, "The Employee and the Manager: The Key to All Development,? we focus on the two people who have the primary responsibility for all employee development. Chapter 10 discusses the vital role that the organization's top leaders must play in building a "leadership pipeline? to ensure that the organization has the management talent it will need in the future to help the organization prosper. In Chapter 11, the focus is on the role of the Human Resources (HR) group in identifying and developing management talent. In many organizations, the training group is part of the HR group, while in other organizations it is separate from HR. For the purpose of this book, we deal separately with the role of the training group in Chapter 12.

In Chapter 13, "The Future of Management Development,? we examine some of the current and future trends that are likely to impact the future of your company's management development efforts. We are grateful to Florence Stone, editorial director for the American Management Association, who conducted a number of interviews with leading thinkers in the field on our behalf and to the interviewees, listed below, for sharing their thoughts with us. They include:

• Professor Richard Boyatzis of Case Western University

• Professor Henry Mintzberg of McGill University

• Jay Jamrog, research vice president of the Institute for Corporate Productivity (I4CP)

• Professor David Ulrich of the University of Michigan

• Professor Allan Cohen of Babson College

• Professor Michael Watkins of IMD (Lausanne, Switzerland)

• Executive coaching guru Marshall Goldsmith

This book is not designed to be a blueprint for management development with detailed specifications on every aspect of the process. No two organizations' management development efforts will look alike—nor should they—each should be tailored to the specific needs and culture of the organization. Our hope is that this book will provide some new ideas, and remind you of some longstanding principles, in the broad field of management development that will help you succeed in your organization's efforts. If you get some new ideas, and if this book sparks some debates within your organization on how you should be developing your management talent for the future, we will consider our purpose well served.

Dan Tobin

Peg Pettingell

American Management Association

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The AMA Guide to Management Development

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