David Ashton

Auditing Management Development

Introduction The purpose of this monograph is to describe a practical process for the assessment of management development in organisations. This aim is achieved through the examination both of a framework for looking at management development in practice, and a specific procedure—the Management Development Audit—by which organisations may obtain data of direct use in the assessment of their management development systems, analysed in a way which will encourage recommendations and strategies for change. Although the monograph focuses specifically on the Management Development Audit, it is also intended to stimulate the readers thinking in terms of examination and reflection upon their own management development systems. This may be best achieved by reflecting carefully upon the kinds of questions and issues to which the Management Development Audit addresses itself.

An Introductory Review

There are two main types of literature on management development: manuals which tell a manager how it should be done and anecdotal accounts of success stories in different organizations under varying circumstances. We see this book as an attempt to integrate the field of management development, believing it necessary both to define the boundaries of what constitutes management development and to explore their implications for the way that management development is carried out in organizations.

Management Development in the Public Sector

There are a number of ways in which public sector organizations can differ from business organizations — for example performance critieria, accountability relationships and the training of officers may be very different in the public sector. Hence it may be anticipated that the approaches adopted towards management development may also be different. In this chapter we are going to concentrate on one major area of the public sector — local government. The chapter covers the changing role of local government Officers in the UK, the current philosophies about management development and the issues that these raise for the wider debate. These are illustrated by a case study from a typical local authority organization. (The main part of this chapter was contributed by Mark Sheldrake.)

Management Development Practices in the Private Sector

The opening chapter reviewed several perspectives of management development. In this chapter and the next one we want to illustrate the range of approaches that have been adopted in different organizations. We shall be concentrating on organizational units of medium and larger size (ranging from approximately 700 to 10,000 employees) and have divided the discussion in these two chapters between private and public sector organizations. The differences in autonomy and accountability between the two sectors are reasonably distinct. In addition there are differences in managerial roles. For example, in the public sector there tends to be a greater emphasis on ‘professionalism’ and status is not so clearly defined by managerial role as it is in the private sector. The meaning of managerial roles, and hence of management development, is therefore likely to be different in the two cases.

Auditing Management Development Systems

The main aim of this chapter is to discuss one way in which the systems framework, described in the previous chapter, may be operationalized within organizations. Specifically we examine the development of an assessment or audit approach to management development. In the process of examining the audit approach we also comment on current concepts and practice in evaluation. The chapter concludes with a detailed case study of the approach, illustrating some of the practical and political problems of decision-taking and the use of information in management development.

A Framework for Management Development

In this book we have consistently taken an organizational focus for management development. When we look at management development at this level, whatever the main components of this function may be, we must see it as a complex area of organizational endeavour. This complexity can be most clearly understood by perceiving management development as a network which embraces the generation and use of information, decision taking, a variety of activities and a range of results.