Can Management Training Make a Difference?
By: Mick, March 8th, 2007
I was speaking to a friend of mine yesterday who works at the National Security Agency (that home page looks pretty “official”) and he was explaining to me that he was in the midst of a two-week management training course that is required of employees who are or may be moving into management positions within the agency. I’m typically skeptical of any such formal training and he did confirm that some of the segments of the course included little-known authors quoting themselves and touting the value of their new management strategies book, etc.
But for the most part he claimed that the course was informative and enlightening. He noted that NSA and the government, in general, had traditionally had a policy of moving the most technically skilled and competent people into management positions. This policy proved ineffective over the years because skilled workers were being pulled from the roles in which they were most productive to assume management roles for which they may have been ill-suited. As a result, overall productivity suffered as effective technical people were moved into roles as ineffective managers of other technical people.
The training program my friend is attending was created to help give new managers some insight into the nuances of managing groups of diverse individuals. He’s managed in other companies and he feels that there is some real value to the program.
If you’re an aspiring manager or are thinking about promoting inexperienced employees to a management level, it is probably a good idea to explore management training.
Tags: employee training, management strategies, management training
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March 10th, 2007 at 12:19 am
The promotion of managers in the workplace with little to no training is one of the most detrimental acts to employee productivity and morale in todays modern work force. New Managers need training on everything from email managment, employee motivation to team evaluation. Many of todays managers are promoted from the ranks where very drastic differences exist in daily expectaions and companies need to prepare these managers prior to placing them in supervisory postions for both the good of the manager and the productivity of the employees they represent and lead.
Todd Dayton
Management Lifeboat