UK managers need L-plates as well as leadership, says report

Citation

(2003), "UK managers need L-plates as well as leadership, says report", Industrial and Commercial Training, Vol. 35 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/ict.2003.03735dab.007

UK managers need L-plates as well as leadership, says report

UK managers need L-plates as well as leadership, says report

An overall lack of management skills will prove to be a brake on the effectiveness of public-sector reform and attempts to improve private-sector productivity in the UK, according to a new report from the Work Foundation.

Can the UK Learn to Manage? reveals that the UK's four million managers receive less training than their counterparts in the USA, Japan, Germany and France and have spent less time in education. UK employers also report that management abilities are one of the most problematic skill gaps.

Despite widespread efforts to evaluate and improve UK management – most recently through the government's Council for Excellence in Management and Leadership (CEML) – the report argues that the country's 4.5 million managers will continue to under-perform unless they get more support. Indeed the government's own priorities have changed since CEML was established during Labour's first term in office. There is now a much greater commitment to improving public services and UK productivity across the board.

According to the Work Foundation, UK managers are not just under-qualified, they are also the least qualified of any comparable group – a situation that would be unacceptable in professions such as medicine, teaching or architecture, for example.

In this context, the report says that the tendency of initiatives such as CEML to over-emphasise the importance of UK business schools and their main product – the MBA – is worrying. On current output rates it would take 583 years to bring all UK managers up to MBA standard.

The Work Foundation also argues that the key to improving management skills and performance lies in a broader and deeper approach to development, where managers learn the skills of management in the context of delivering the products and services and with on-the-job learning as important as other forms of learning. In this sense, the report says that undergraduate learning, on-the-job training and national vocational qualifications are at least as important as the MBA and business schools, if the UK is to crack its public- and private-sector performance problems.

The Work Foundation highlights the need for the modern management course to include technological knowledge and awareness, ethical awareness and appreciation of the role of business in society, strategic awareness, diversity awareness, political studies, management of people, and entrepreneurship and innovation.

Andy Westwood, co-author of the report and head of public policy research at the Work Foundation, said: "We have more managers than pretty much any comparative country – now some four million of them. But more does not mean better; in fact, for the UK it means more under-qualified, more under-prepared managers for whatever the job in hand happens to be. We need to rethink completely how we prepare our managers and perhaps also we need to rethink how we all too often reach for management as the solution to all of our workplace problems."