development, and ensuring, as far as possible, that management
succession is provided for.
Managers need to be given the opportunity to develop them-
selves. As Peter Drucker (1955) wrote in The Practice of
Management:
Development is always self-development. Nothing could be more
absurd than for the enterprise to assume responsibility for the devel-
opment of a man. The responsibility rests with the individual, his abil-
ities, his efforts... Every manager in a business has the opportunity to
encourage self-development or to stifle it, to direct it or to misdirect
it. He should be specifically assigned the responsibility for helping all
men working with him to focus, direct and apply their self-develop-
ment efforts productively. And every company can provide system-
atic development changes to its managers.In Douglas McGregor’s phrase, managers are grown – they are
neither born nor made. And your role is to provide conditions
favourable to foster growth. As McGregor (1960) wrote in The
Human Side of Enterprise:
The job environment of the individual is the most important variable
affecting his development. Unless that environment is conducive to
his growth, none of the other things we do to him or for him will be
effective. That is why the ‘agricultural’ approach to management
development is preferable to the ‘manufacturing’ approach. The latter
leads, among other things, to the unrealistic expectations that we can
create and develop managers in the classroom.There are two main activities in management development –
performance management, discussed in Chapter 26, and
planned experience, discussed below.
Planned experience
People learn mainly through experience. Surely, therefore, it is
worth spending a little of your time planning the experience of
anyone with potential for development.
Planning people’s experience means giving them extra tasks to
do which provide a challenge or extend them into a new area. It
could be a project which they have to complete themselves or
they could be included in a project team looking at a new devel-
opment or problem which cuts across organizational boundaries.
How to Develop People 79