Education For Leadership

The International Administrative Staff Colleges 1948-1984

A T Cornwall-Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134564224
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

As well as being a history of administrative staff colleges in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan, India, the Phillipines and Ghana between 1948 and 1984, the colleges' contribution to the development of effective managers is evaluated.

PART I

1

EARLY HENLEY – THE ADMINISTRATIVE STAFF COLLEGE, 1948-57

The Concept

Before inviting the reader to accompany me overseas I must try and describe the ideals for which The Administrative Staff College at Henley stood in its early years, beginning in this first chapter with the thinking on which the college had been built as I understood it when I went on my first assignment to Australia in 1957.

I had discovered by then that the men and women who had launched it had identified a great opportunity in the field of management education. Some years before the end of the Second World War, they had seen that the task of the manager of the future was going to be much more exacting as the growth and complexity of all kinds of enterprise and the intermingling of government and business activity increased. More should therefore be done, they thought, to help managers get themselves ready for the responsibility they would carry if they reached the higher ranges in whatever field of administrative activity they might be engaged: government, local government, nationalised industry, private industry and commerce, trade unions, etc. If we were to avoid slipping back into the tragedies of the inter-war years, they ought not to be left to acquire knowledge laboriously and inadequately on the job as they had been in the past. There surely must be principles of administration and organisation which could be explored and taught; surely the level and vigour of management thinking could be raised; surely the co-operative effort of the war could be projected into the peace. Where to make a start was a critical question to which Sir Hector Hetherington, the then vice-chancellor of Glasgow University and a member of the first Court of Governors, supplied an answer in now well-known words:

A time comes, in eight or ten or fifteen years when, having learned and practised his calling, a man does well to cease for a little from action and to think about what he is doing, and why and how he is doing it. That is apt to be the most fruitful educational phase of all. The best thinking springs from practice; but a man who, by thinking, has more thoroughly possessed himself of what he is and does is ripe for greater responsibility.

It was to the service of men and women at this stage in their working lives that the Henley College was created. Their ideas were likely to be firming up but would not be fixed. If they could be carefully selected for the college, it should be possible to help them accelerate their own growth and development. From their ranks many would later be selected for greater responsibility and placed in positions where others as well as they themselves would profit from their experience. And so the college might make a contribution to the national well-being.

Our founders were impressed by the idea that such people would profit from exposure to one another at close quarters, as well as from exposure to the many others who could be marshalled from the community to challenge and stimulate their thinking. The college would become a residential forum for managers from all forms of activity. The strength of the group assembled would spring not only from its maturity but also its variety, which would invite, if not compel, the individual to compare his knowledge, his experience, his outlook, his style, and his capacity with those of his contemporaries. He would have the opportunity to discover the roles played by those in other walks of life, to find out that many of their problems would not be so different from, and indeed would often be similar or at least related to, his own. Thus the barriers of mutual ignorance and consequent mistrust between people, which too often prevailed, might begin to fall and people might be helped to find a greater unity of purpose in our national life. Discoveries like these, as they unfolded in the individual member’s mind, would broaden his sympathy and quicken his perception, surely leading to a better understanding of other people’s way of life and point of view. In all this, special emphasis was laid upon there being continually represented in the college men and women from central government, local government, nationalised industry and private industry, whose capacity to work together would improve as they each discovered the different work situations and responsibilities of the others. The cross-fertilisation of thinking and practice between these four vital sectors in our economy might indeed make a major contribution to the college purpose – ‘not theory but better practice directed to the fuller service of the public interest.’

If the college was to attract people of this standing and in this variety it was doubtful if their employers would spare them, from the responsible jobs they held, for courses that lasted for more than three months. As they would inevitably come from widely different educational backgrounds, traditional academic methods would be quite unsuitable to them. Members would need to participate in the process of learning and take a large share in the responsibility for the work they did. This would be done largely in small groups of ten or eleven members. The subjects laid before them would be of a new character; the staff would be of a different kind – a small group at the centre of a web where the needs of individual members and groups could be observed at very close quarters and their development encouraged; and the need for help from outside the college could be recognised and built into a developing course of studies.

The college would be pioneering in almost all it did. To get it started it would have to be made clear that the whole idea had the support of a substantial number of influential people who believed in what they were doing; who could persuade others to support it; who would find the right man to be the first principal, see that he got what he needed to start, and back him when the idea was put to the test. Later on in this book the reader will become aware of the blood, sweat and tears that attend upon principals as they approach the opening date of their college. I will not drag you through the agony that must have attended the first principal of all in his struggle in the aftermath of the Second World War to set up the first. I shall assume that his difficulties were overcome, as they were, and turn now to draw my picture of Henley as I saw it when I joined in 1950.

Translating Broad Intentions into Practice: Admissions

There is in existence, as far as I know, only one really authoritative account of the way the college at Henley was put together. This comes from the mind of the first principal, Noel Hall, who was appointed by the Court of Governors, whose chairman was Sir Geoffrey Heyworth (later Lord Heyworth), to put into practice their broad intentions. It appears in a small book of three lectures delivered by Noel Hall to an audience at New York University in 1958 (The Making of Higher Executives: The Modern Challenge, Vol. 1, Ford Distinguished Lectures). The book has in it a great deal of wisdom. It is out of print but the college is arranging for it to be reprinted so that it will be available for those who are interested. Indeed, for a full understanding of Henley it is essential reading. It is the middle lecture which proved to be of particular assistance to many who were concerned with the early Henley ideas and came to understand the detail and the care that went into the preparation of the original college. The thinking in this lecture was part of early Henley and, published as it was in 1958, I did not have it in my hand in Australia but I did have it in my head. Subsequently, on countless occasions I was glad indeed to have it by me in all the colleges I later worked in.

In the men and women who had ‘learned and practised their calling for from ten to fifteen years’, we were looking for people who were doing well in middle management: who showed some signs in their employers’ eyes of being capable of going up into more senior and perhaps even eventually very high positions. We wanted to form a group in which everyone would have left behind him the work of a junior manager, concerned more with the carrying out of instructions and geared to thinking of the day’s and this week’s needs. We looked for people who had already tasted responsibility, had already had to make some decisions of their own and answer for them, had begun at least to think ahead in terms of next year’s needs and beyond, begun to think of their work as it fitted into the work of their undertaking as a whole and who had recognised the need for the integration of the various parts of an undertaking and, indeed, probably played some part in it. We wanted this feel of responsibility and understanding of what was involved in being a manager because it was the material on which members had some chance of building.

It was confirmed in the early years that this kind of person did seem to come broadly from a bracket of 32-42 years of age, so in our speech and in our handbooks we stated that we were looking for people who already held responsibility in their own field of work and were likely to be in this age bracket, although this was not always the case. We simply asked that if a nominator wanted to send someone a little above or below the age range, he should give us the reason before we interviewed the candidate. The variety in the group in those days was well spread. In each session between 1950 and 1957, when I left for Australia, the variety we wanted had been coming in and we were constantly getting sessions composed as follows:

First kind of mixture:

Civil Service Nationalised industries		6		Each from different departments. Sometimes more than one from the same nationalised industry, but usually each from a different nationalised industry.
		8–9
Private industry		42-4		In a few cases a company was represented by two men, but this was rare. In most cases each man came from a different enterprise.
Overseas members (mostly British Commonwealth)		6		Might be from public or private sectors of the nominator’s economy. The college essential was that each should have been born, educated and worked overseas and so would bring a different attitude of mind to his session.
Local government		1-2		A little irregular as the method of selecting local-government officials was developing gradually.
Fighting services		1-2		Never more than two per session.

Second kind of mixture:

Within the same group there was another kind of mixture:

Civil Service		The six men were sometimes generalists, sometimes specialists.
Nationalised industries		The eight or nine would come spread between area management, production, marketing, accountancy, occasionally research and occasionally purchasing.
Private enterprise		These varied a little, but were about: production 12, marketing 12, accountants 6, research 6, banking 6; directors occasionally. Six.
Overseas Trade unions		Between 1950 and 1957 no trade union had felt able to nominate a trade-union member.

The first kind of mixture gave each session a cross-section of members from each sector of the economy; the second gave each session of the same members a cross-section of the specialisations in which individuals typically at the time acquired their early and limited managerial experience. Extremely careful steps were taken, as the composition of each session was finally settled, to see that the members with different specialisations were distributed as evenly as possible among the six syndicates, each syndicate becoming a microcosm of the whole session. A small group of 10-11 members was thus well equipped to enable its members to combine and to help each specialist to overcome the difficulties he might be experiencing in passing from specialist to more general responsibilities.

In the days when the sole preoccupation of the college was in this particular level of person, Noel Hall regarded admissions as one of his prime tasks and had a registrar to help him discharge it. Inquiries about the college were legion. Outside commitments to meet and explain and discuss persisted, and he never ceased to respond. Somehow he managed to interview two hundred people a year at the very least, having the final say on whether individuals should be accepted or not; and he continued also to move among the sessions and keep a firm hand on every three-month course. When I say he had the final say in accepting and rejecting proposed candidates, this was one of those permissive pieces of legislation which were seldom used, as both nominators and the college came to understand that there were at least three parties whose responsibilities and convenience had to be taken into account: the nominator who could not, in the nature of managerial life, spare a good middle manager for three months at the drop of a hat; the individual, who had to leave his work and his home, and could not be asked to do so for three months at the drop of a hat; and the college, which had a specific responsibility laid upon it to secure in every session individuals of the level, and a group of the variety, which the Court of Governors believed to be indispensable to the pursuit of the college purpose. The build-up of a college relationship with its nominators was a crucial part of the build-up of the whole college. No wonder, in those early days, that the principal played such a strong hand in it.

The registrar’s responsibility was to see that the whole relationship was fostered with the care that it obviously required. While it was true that the Civil Service nominations were gathered for us by a single department, the Treasury, it was also true that as different departments nominated candidates through the Treasury for the college to interview, and they came and went through these early sessions, there was established between the college and each of those departments and ministries an individual relationship which neither the department nor the college hesitated to use if it so wished. This applied to the whole spectrum of relationships with each nationalised industry, with each large and each small company in the private sector, and with the departments of state, ministries and each local government aut...