Management Training that Thinks Outside the Box

Managerial positions are necessarily different from their lower level counterparts. Part of the point of being a manager is to be able to think sideways if necessary – to develop unique and effective responses to unforeseen circumstances; to control and alleviate problems; and to take advantage of changes in the market or the business environment. Management training, then, is best when it is as unexpected or as challenging as the managerial environment.

Basic management coaching is ideal for new management recruits, who need to develop skills that can’t be taught anywhere else: the ability to inspire staff loyalty; the ability to lead by example; and the ability to structure time efficiently. In terms of management, none of these skills are imparted better than when they are imparted on a basic training course.

Once a manager has cut his or her teeth, he or she can move to learning skills that apply specifically to a developed managerial role. Management training of this sort gets managers acquainted with project management; meetings; finances; presentation skills; coaching; discipline and grievance procedures; and hiring new staff.

All of these things are valuable strings to put in a managerial bow. The piece de resistance, though, is the ability to learn how to be genuinely instinctive – to be a reactive and successful manager under any set of circumstances. That’s where bespoke training comes in – training sessions and exercises developed by highly experienced third party companies, which take briefs from CEOs and MDs and turn them into exciting “real world” training events.

Training of this nature can take any suitable format. In normal circumstances the management training provider will respond to a brief from a company’s upper management structure by delivering a series of training programme proposals. Once a training programme has been approved, it is developed and put into practice either over a series of modules or as dynamic one or two day events.

Modern training trends are moving towards the use of delegate’s own experiences and personalities to bring out their managerial talent. A modern training programme will often include fast paced “reactive” sessions, in which the delegates are asked to solve live problems. It can also use the delegates themselves as leaders. In a programme such as this the goal of the training programme is clearly defined but the trainers use the experiences and characteristics of the delegates to inform the learning process that achieves that goal.