Mid-Career Development

Research perspectives on a developmental community for senior administrators

Robert N. Rapoport

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136431524
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

Tavistock Press was established as a co-operative venture between the Tavistock Institute and Routledge & Kegan Paul (RKP) in the 1950s to produce a series of major contributions across the social sciences.
This volume is part of a 2001 reissue of a selection of those important works which have since gone out of print, or are difficult to locate. Published by Routledge, 112 volumes in total are being brought together under the name The International Behavioural and Social Sciences Library: Classics from the Tavistock Press.
Reproduced here in facsimile, this volume was originally published in 1970 and is available individually. The collection is also available in a number of themed mini-sets of between 5 and 13 volumes, or as a complete collection.

PART ONE

The Context of Management Training

Chapter I · General Management

A PERSPECTIVE

M. B. Brodie

Generalship is a concept that is used a great deal in practice even though it lacks its theory.

It is most familiar in the context of supreme military command, a notion which emerged in times gone by as a result of the delegation of military responsibility by the monarch. It occurs in the vocabulary of religious organization. A ‘general superior’ is the supreme head of a religious order in the Catholic Church, who governs in accordance with the constitution of the order and the laws of the Church and has authority over all members of the order.

The same essential idea is to be found in the notion of general management. Enterprises frequently have ‘General Managers’. The attributes of generalship and the qualities of the generalist reflect the top-level nature of this role and the power and responsibility which correspond to it, for providing leadership, for looking to the broader-ranging and external issues as well as to those within the enterprise, and in particular for developing policies which integrate the activities of the enterprise and reconcile conflicting interests.

How general management is understood in practice can perhaps be illustrated by examples from the private sector of five firms invited by the British Institute of Management to present and explain their ‘General Management Practice’. (The first of these presentations was in January 1966, and short papers were prepared for each.)

The Metal Box Company put the emphasis on company organization and structure, forecasting, and budgeting. F. Perkins Ltd built their presentation around the themes of planning, control, and communication. Joseph Lucas Ltd concentrated on structure and overall management, and their production and personnel policies. Sterling Winthrop Group Ltd, a subsidiary of a United States firm, put the whole emphasis on policies for growth, on the problems of developing their business in Europe, and on personnel policies. Renold Ltd reviewed their finance, manufacturing, selling, and personnel policies, their group structure, the overseas subsidiaries, and how they saw their future.

Although there is this diversity of approach, in each instance general management is identified with the wider issues of organization and policy, with the way each main area of the business is related to the enterprise as a whole and with prospects and plans.

In the Civil Service, though pre-eminence has attached to those in positions of generalist responsibility, the concept of the generalist is now under attack, and debate has been enlivened by the appearance of the Fulton Committee Report (Fulton, 1968). The first of the half dozen main inadequacies the Committee detected in the Civil Service was ‘the philosophy of the amateur (or “generalist” or “all-rounder”)’ (Fulton, 1968, paragraph 15), which they saw as running counter to the need for Civil Servants to be skilled managers. The Committee wrestled with the usually contrasted notions of the specialist and the administrator, to establish the proper relationship between specialists and administrators and to clarify how the career of an individual may shift him from one role to the other. An administrator in his early years had to specialize in a particular area, but ‘modern administration requires men to have breadth as well as depth’ (Fulton, 1968, paragraph 42), and specialisms had not to be too narrowly conceived. What was now required from all administrators was a ‘fuller professionalism’. In what respects the fuller professionals differ from the generalists is not very clear from the Report, a point that illustrates the difficulty faced by the Committee in unravelling complex issues with the aid of a vocabulary lacking in precision.

As to the concept of the generalist itself, views are divided. Following the appointment of the Fulton Committee, the Institution of Professional Civil Servants commissioned an independent comparative study of the role and career expectations of the professional vis-à-vis the administrator. Various authors, all university teachers, were asked to look at France, Germany, Sweden, Australia, and the US, as well as Britain. Reviewing the main findings, the editor singled out one major lesson: ‘… nowhere does one find anything like a theory justifying the separation, either of persons or of functions, into generalists and specialists, administrators and advisers’ (Ridley, 1968, pp. 10–11). In the comparison, Britain was the odd man out. None of the other countries had anything like the British administrative class or a recruitment policy for the higher Civil Servant on a non-vocational basis.

One critic (Hobsbawm, 1968), taking part in a series of broadcast talks following the publication of the Fulton Report, contended that it was quite wrong to equate the notion of ‘the amateur’ with the generalist all-round administrator. He argued that the report confused two quite separate things: specialist expertise, on the one hand, and ‘a sufficient familiarity … with a subject to make reasonable judgements about it’, on the other. Confusion on this obscures ‘a crucial point that what is required today is more and better “generalists” and “all-rounders” in administration, and not more specialists’ and the tendency has been in this direction in all forms of decision-making and policy-making. Another (Lord Helsby, 1968), accepting the need for a ‘basic professionalism in the business of government combined with imagination and sound judgement’, was not entirely convinced by the stress which the Fulton Committee placed on the specialist techniques. He was also impressed by the trouble to which large business concerns went to produce men with general administrative ability.

What are the more general areas of responsibility in running an enterprise? A leading American scholar (Cole, 1965) suggested half a dozen spheres of action which, to a greater or lesser degree, must be the concern of those responsible for the exercise of power. These are: determination of objectives and their modification as conditions require; development and maintenance of an organization; securing adequate financial resources; acquiring efficient technological equipment and keeping it up to date; establishing a market and devising new products; maintaining good relations with public authorities and with society at large.

At the Administrative Staff College, it is held to be important that those who are to occupy posts at general management level should learn

‘(a)	to see their role in their enterprise in relation to its main objectives and in its total environment,
(b)	to understand the implications for their enterprise of government policies and of the changing domestic and international situation,
(c)	to evaluate their own experience and attitudes against those of people of similar standing and ability working in other enterprises and in other countries,
(d)	to assess new knowledge, thought, techniques and methods and their application in management,
(e)	to develop the skills of obtaining decisions from a group of people of diverse expertise, experience and temperament,
(f)	to assess wisely and quickly what is important in unfamiliar areas and situations,
(g)	to appreciate the particular responsibilities and problems of top management.’

General management is thus crucially a total-enterprise activity, a matter of making overall policy and putting it into practice, based on the view taken by those in top management of the place of the enterprise in the environment and the particular direction it should take. However, the very fact that this is a generalized activity can obscure the part of the individual more senior manager in all this.

How a manager and his enterprise interact and how they both relate to society at large are important questions. Traditional literature in this field too often treated considerations of personality in isolation, and exposés of personality requirements for management were notoriously superficial. No doubt, in part, this was due to the influence of ideas about highly individualistic, often idiosyncratic, behaviour which was supposed to characterize men of leadership and action, and, indeed, some have behaved very idiosyncratically indeed. But one unfortunate effect was to couch explanations of enterprise, success, and failure primarily in personality terms.

However, in most situations, this is now seen to be by no means the whole, or even the greater part, of the explanation, which has to be sought in a more careful analysis of the relationships between personality, behaviour, and the social context. Correctives have been gaining ground. ‘Field theory’ in psychology and recent developments in systems theory have helped to shift the emphasis to the study of relationships and interactions between individuals and the groups to which they belong, and between groups within enterprises and those outside it. Analysis of both individual behaviour and enterprise performance has, as a consequence, been put onto a sounder basis.

A crucial conceptual element in this has been the notion of ‘role’. It links what is socially required or expected of people holding given posts with the motivations and modes of behaviour of the individuals who occupy them, and has served to clarify the nature of the problems facing those in positions of responsibility. In a complex society, an individual will hold many different roles. He has to reconcile his more personal wishes, ideas, and ways of behaving with what is expected of him in his various roles, and as a manager he must do this without sacrificing a readiness to behave in ways different from those so far socially approved or sanctioned, where he deems this appropriate. Complexity is in the very nature of policy-level situations. Tensions and conflicts characterize them, and it is the responsibility of those who fill these roles to achieve a workable and satisfactory resolution of them.

Those who occupy the higher-level positions have the particular responsibility of dealing with matters which cut across functions, departments, and sectional concerns. Much of their work is thus at the boundaries of the various ‘sub-systems’. A. T. M. Wilson, referring to what he calls ‘the integrative need of the executive’, draws attention to the problems confronting the professional executive in his endeavours to make sense of complex situations and confusing data, and his need for a framework so that he can have an overall view of his world: ‘It may on occasion force him to add up or to multiply things which cannot be added or multiplied; and it is certain to contain imperfections, inconsistencies and evasions’ (Wilson, 1967). He further points to the problem which arises because this integrative task conflicts with the pluralist assumptions, concepts, and hypotheses of the wide range of people – internal specialists and outsiders – with whom he must work.

The notion of role comes in very importantly in a unique study by a professional philosopher of the moral problems which arise within large organizations. Dorothy Emmet severely criticizes the separation between sociology and ethics, and argues that moralists would do well to look at sociological studies, using the notion of role to provide the link between factual descriptions of social situations and moral pronouncements on what ought to be done in them. In a thought-provoking development of her argument, she talks about the ethics of role, the problems of a lack of clear coincidence between responsibility and actual power, and ‘the morality of institutional action where the relations between personal kinds of responsibility and the impersonal kinds come to a head’ (Emmet, 1966, p. 201).

It is in the creation of a new role or in changing the image of an existing one that she sees the attributes of exceptional individuals. This reflection evokes Lloyd Warner’s description of managers as ‘cultural mediators of the present as it moves from the past into the future, people who have to handle a structured past and yet make decisions which take them into an unstructured future, a requirement which is inevitably accompanied with conflict, tension, and ambiguity’. He asks what characteristics of personality are then necessary. Most important would be autonomy, the ability to make a decision on one’s own, and to act freely, creatively, and independently. Such people must also have the ability to quickly structure what they see; they should be ‘capable of putting together the changing parts of their society and the flow of events within their economic life to form them into a world of meaning and significance for action’ (Warner, 1960, p. 120). As a corollary, managers must have a proper understanding of the culture within which they work and a sensitivity to the problems of cultural change. Cochran (1965) illustrates this very vividly. He puts forward a number of propositions relevant to economic growth to compare USA and Latin-American culture. He suggests, for example, that Latin-American values give more priority to family interests than to economy and profit maximization. Social and personal emotional interests are more important than business obligations. Nepotism may be favoured at the expense of continuity of able top management, and so on. He makes it clear that though these qualities may be hindrances to material progress they are not necessarily inimical to what Latin Americans would call the good life. There is a growing recognition of the importance of these basic cultural considerations and it is because they are so important that, in Cochran’s judgement, a new period may be starting in which, after a generation of increased specialization, the need will be for generalists.

The growing significance of managers in society is a development which goes beyond ideological boundaries. Consider the example of Poland. Bauman, drawing on investigations carried out by the Sociological Research Bureau of the Higher School of Social Sciences in Warsaw, found that there had been

‘a remarkable shift from predominantly ideological to mainly technical and managerial preoccupations; the party meetings come gradually to resemble consultative assemblies; the content of individual and collective tasks confided to people in their capacity as party members is, in much greater proportion than before, connected directly with the purely industrial life of the factory … Political merit and ideological virtues are no longer a sufficient qualification for the performance of party functions: one must possess vocational education and professional skill to deal with technical and administrative problems at a table with specialists of the highest rank’ (Bauman, 1964, p. 214).

A study of the USSR illustrates this further. Managers have acquired a significant and recognized place in Soviet society. Their influence during the last decade or so of Stalin’s rule grew. In this period, top managers gained a greater say in policy-making and enlarged the degree of autonomy of their enterprises. Indeed, one writer saw Kosygin’s appointment as premier in 1964 as indicating ‘… a willingness to accord the leaders of the industrial establishment high symbolic status and a pledge of continued receptivity to managerial demands’ (Azrael, 1966, p. 149).

This having been said, the question arises of the involvement of managers in politics and of how far they may constitute an independent force for political change. Azrael sees little likelihood in the USSR of the managerial elite producing political dissidents. One of the main reasons for this is the managerial recruitment and training process. By origins, selection, and education, Soviet managers, it seems, are unlikely to question the dominance of those whose primary aim is political, and he considers the argument sufficiently strong to justify a quotation from Thorstein Veblen as a preamble to his conclusion:

‘By settled habit the technicians, engineers and industrial experts are a harmless and docile sort, well fed on the whole and somewhat placidly content with the “full dinner pail”, which the … Vested Interests habitually allow them’ (Azrael, 1966, p. 173).

This may leave unanswered the interesting question as to what might happen if the managerial elite actively sought to exert political power. Some interpretations of events in Eastern Europe suggest that this might be happening.

Fears of technocracy have often been voiced. Is there a danger that technical experts and managers, through their influence on organization, will form a new ruling class? Such a threat, as applied to France, is discounted by Crozier (1964), one of the most perceptive writers in this field, for an interesting reason. He contends that this fear derives from a misunderstanding of the nature of technical and scientific progress. The success of the experts and the managers is constantly self-defeating. As they rationalize processes, others are then able to take them over, and the power which comes from their expertise disappears. ‘When progress accelerates, the power of the expert is diminished and managerial power becomes more and more a political and judicial power rather than a technical one’ (Crozier, 1964, p. 300), which takes us back to social and political analysis.

For a fuller explanation of such findings we need to know more about the nature of the work senior managers do and the way others expect them to carry it out, though these are matters on which we must conjecture, since most studies by social scientists have taken very limited facets of managerial action and attitudes as their focus, not the complex areas of high-level policy-making.

The problem is further complicated because one facet of the work of those taking the critical decisions in enterprises has usually been related to the more elusive and individualistic qualities which in the nineteenth century were attributed to the entrepreneur. Has the era of the entrepreneur passed, or are the general managers of today what the entrepreneurs were in the nineteenth century?

One view would have it that entrepreneurship is a very different thing from management, almost antithetical to it. The entrepreneur as the bold thrusting individual with a zest for innovation, dominating the enterprise he owns, is contrasted with the career-manager, a bureaucrat concerned with stability rather than change, with little or no financial stake in the business. This view remains powerful and persistent. It helps to explain why in Britain there is an Institute of Directors with a philosophy that differentiates direction from management or why in Germany companies have a board of directors responsible for policy and a separate managerial board for operating the business (Shonfield, 1965).

The role of the individualist entrepreneur, mostly seen in retrospect, may have become exaggerated, and, with contemporary discussion of management more often journalistic than scholarly, judgement is difficult. Comparing American and British technology in the nineteenth century, Habakkuk (1962) inclined to the conclusion that men were bold and expansionist primarily because circumstances were conducive. It was favourable market conditions which brought out the capacity of businessmen, not the other way round. It was because th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Lord Fulton
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART ONE · THE CONTEXT OF MANAGEMENT TRAINING
• PART TWO · EXPERIENCES OF HENLEY
• PART THREE · MANAGERS AND THEIR CAREERS
• PART FOUR · FINDINGS AND IMPLICATIONS
• APPENDICES
• II A Note on the McQuitty Hierarchical Linkage Analysis
• III List of Variables in Thirteen Key Clusters, and Weights assigned them
• References
• Name Index
• Subject Index