Writing Assignment help on : Week 10 Workplace Learning
Mason’s management training problem
You are a training coordinator, aged 26, working in the Human Resource Department of a large private sector service organisation. Your boss, Roger Mason, is the HR Director. He has worked with the organisation for 15 years and is considered by senior management to be effective. However, he is not so highly regarded by many other staff in the organisation, who see HR as a very bureaucratic department, absorbed in paperwork and procedures rather than offering real help to anyone. Mason’s main interest and workload lie in industrial relations. He is currently heavily involved in drawing up an equal opportunity policy for the organisation. He has always tended to ‘manage by exception’, only worrying when things go wrong. Staff are reluctant to ask him, or each other, for help, as they are afraid that this may be construed as a sign of incompetence on their part, and most stick rigidly to their job descriptions. You do not much like working in the department, but are hoping that once you have a little more experience you will get another post and move on. Just after you joined the organisation, Mason told you to ‘do something about educating our junior and middle managers‘. He said top management felt that the performance of these groups, and of supervisors below them, was not always as good as it could be. Furthermore, the younger people at least, many of who were in technical functions, would be moving up in the next few years, and it was felt that they needed a greater awareness of what general management involved. Mason would like some courses to be organised, although nothing too expensive. You believed that education was a very important part of people’s development: it broadened their minds and gave them new knowledge and skills. You therefore suggested that about six managers at various levels and from different departments in the organisation should be sent on a Diploma of Management Studies (DMS) course at the local TAFE (Technical and Further Education College) each year. The two-year part-time course involved attendance one afternoon and evening a week, with subjects like Organisational Behaviour, Quantitative Methods, Management Practice, Finance and Marketing. Students also had to tackle a work-based project in their second year. Mason liked the idea, particularly as it did not involve his department in anything more than calling for nominees and organising their attendance. Subsequently 16 managers have gone on the DMS, at the rate of around five a year. Mason chose all from nominations made by the superior officers of the staff concerned. He did not explain the criteria either of the nominations or of his selections to you. This year Mason has been asked by top management for some information about the management programme to go into the Annual Report. Last week he came to you in a panic, asking you to provide the information for him in two weeks time. You have therefore been going around departments talking to all those who have been through the courses, or are still studying on them. The courses seem popular with the staff from departments like management services, sales and marketing — all of whom tend to be in their twenties or thirties, and with degrees or equivalent qualifications. They find the course content intellectually stimulating, and some are able to apply newly learnt techniques to their jobs, although the majority finds that there is no real support for or interest in this in their departments. However, this remark made by one of them to you typifies the general feelings of this group: ‘I won’t be here forever, so I’ll be able to use the learning in the next job I get. In the meantime, it’s certainly made me more aware of the deficiencies of this place — especially how out of date my boss is! Pity you couldn’t persuade him to do one of these courses!’
The nine staff from this group who have gone through the DMS or are currently studying for it, have all done well in course work and final examinations, and have particularly enjoyed the project work. Unfortunately the seven staff from technical departments are neither so satisfied nor so successful. Their average age is mid-thirties to mid-forties, and all have technical qualifications, one a degree. Some of them have supervisory responsibilities, others do not. All find the course hard, some because so much of the content is completely outside their experience and the others because, to quote one: ‘We’ve been doing jobs perfectly well up to now: why are we being pushed onto these college courses? We’re not going to get more pay or promotion, and there’s nothing new in any of it except that Organisational Behaviour stuff — and that’s just common sense, anyway — a lot of jargon, but that’s all it really is.’ One of the technical staff dropped out after two months and although three others passed the examinations last year, one did not, and has to resit this year. Most feel that on balance the DMS is pointless for them. It does not help them with their daily problems, and they resent the fact that whilst ‘whiz kids from sales and marketing have got it made‘ they themselves cannot even get cover when they are away each week, and they already have such a mass of work to do that piling up ‘all this homework business’ was just an impossible burden. You have a preliminary chat with Mason about these reactions, and he is rather concerned, especially about the technical people and their managers, with whom he has never had particularly good relationships. He has asked you to meet with him to discuss the situation.
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