4 Responses

1. Management Curriculum

   As a starting point you might find it useful to have a look at the CMI website:   http://www.managers.org.uk/ then go to the qualifications section to get an idea of the topics covered at Level 3 and Level 5. This will give you an idea of what the Accrediting body considers important generic areas for managers to learn then you can add on any addtional industry specific or organisation specific areas.

   Hope that helps,

   Margaret

2. This will keep the repliers busy Alice

   Alice, you will get no shortage of responses to this one.

   I will be happy to advise – best offline so your specific needs can be best understood.

   You describe what I have done for a living since 1982, and in that time I have learned a fair bit that may be of value.

   The most important thing is to get it right…that may sound a bit fundamental and obvious, and what I mean is get it wrong and you will be very exposed.

   Do get in touch if you think its worth a more thorough exploration.

   Andrew Gibbons

3. Middle Management

   I agree with Margaret about looking at much of the work that has already been done in this area. If you did look at the CMI standards, you will be able to draw out a lot of content based on your own knowledge of your middle managers. If you have your own competencies or behaviours, these too are useful in designing in-house programmes. Have fun.

   Alec

4. Commercial Management Skills
   Hi Alice,

   In my experience the design of a middle management programme is one of the most difficult areas to get right as it covers such a broad audience. I don’t believe their are any generic skills for middle managers although their can be similarities in developing manager’s skills towards leadership positions.

   I undertook a project for a client 18 months ago and am happy to share the approach although it was tailored to the specific client I was working with and may not therefore be appropriate. To summarise this was an organisation who had very effective first line management and leadership programmes but were aware that their were a number of managers between the two who were receiving no development support. I met with the senior team of the organisation to understand the business vision and strategy, identified what middle managers needed to do and their current skill and knowledge level, held focus groups with individuals who were both the target audience and their line managers and checked this against the latest performance reviews. Ideally I would have also checked this against the competencies but this particular organisation hadn’t got a levelled framework and the data was therefore a little meaningless at this level. This showed that what was missing at this level were commercial management skills so we created a programme covering 6 areas:

   Business Thinking (idea generation, analysis, assessing risks, making decisions)
   Business Planning
   Budgeting and Forecasting
   Writing business cases and reports
   Influencing Skills
   Presentation Skills

   In between each module (the entire programme took a year) the groups worked on real life projects using the skills and knowledge gained so that at the end of the programme the company had two new (in this particular case) potential revenue streams.

   Hope this gives some ideas to you,

   Regards, Andrew

   http://www.ajlaycock.com