Introduction

To become a manager is the main goal of the most students of management. That itself is often hard enough. In this document I will deal with the case that you are no longer a student, but a (more or less) successful manager. Probably every manager has some plans about what his career should be like and what he wants to achieve. There is (almost) no one who can get a top position straight away from the university. The positions in top-management are occupied mostly by grey-haired men. It needs to be said that for obvious reasons. Even though they are not so quick in mind anymore, nothing can match their experience. They have gone through a very long managerial development and have learned a lot. Let’s see how you or I can do something for becoming senior executives. First, I will write something about the past of management development. The most common method was training:
Management Training at the Turn of the last Century
In the past, organizations developed managers, primary by recognizing an individual’s strong occupational knowledge about the organization’s products or services. These individuals were promoted to first-level positions that included work direction. One cannot say they supervised in the current sense of the word, that is, they usually didn't delegate, support career counseling, conduct performance reviews, etc. Rather, they told workers what to do and workers did it. These work directors had little training about supervision, e.g., about delegating, interpersonal skills, stress management, career developments, etc. Management Training in the 50s to 80s
Management development focused on covering certain standard topics or types of activities in the organization, e.g., planning, organizing, finances, sales, accounting, etc. Managers would immerse themselves in the current course, then leave that course to immerse in the next. However, reality is that a manager in the workplace seldom solves a problem by applying his or her knowledge of one specific topic (then goes on to solve the next problem by applying his or her knowledge of another specific topic). A highly effective manager integrates expertise across various management topics. Yet few management schools provided opportunity for managers to integrate and apply information from their various courses.