Closing the management skills gap: a call for action

摘要

An engineer is promoted into a supervisory position with no training whatsoever. A middle manager takes on a new functional area as part of restructuring with little forewarning or preparation. An organization develops a new performance appraisal system and simply hands it to managers to implement as they see fit. A new computer-based finance management system is rolled out in a large service enterprise and managers are expected to learn the system "on the fly". All of these examples have a common denominator in that they illustrate the fact that managers are frequently asked to do important, new and challenging things with little or no training. This happens, despite a growing body of literature that suggests that effective managerial training is critical to achieving or maintaining competitive advantage. To explore why organizations frequently provide no or inadequate training, the authors asked managers to list the reasons they had observed that organizations fail to properly train their managers. These responses were content analyzed and frequencies and percentages for each category of responses cited tabulated, and the resulting top ten reasons supplied identified (Longenecker and Fink, 2005). One major limitation of this study was that almost no suggestions were provided for how to deal with the specific identified problems. Since the publication of this study, additional data have been collected. Our results are now based on a sample of 323 seasoned managers who were on average 42.5 years of age; had 12.7 years of managerial experience; and operated in 16 different functional business areas. a total of 75 percent of the sample was male, while 25 percent were female. Statistics were recalculated to include the information from the new sample population.