Individual Needs

As stated in the previous chapter, the beginnings of management training assumed that the needs were for various management techniques … the things, in short, which could be taught in a classroom. Of course such things are needed but the technical needs are not the major ones: few managers are limited in their achievements by the want of techniques in their own speciality. Providing somebody in the firm is keeping up to date, the latest marketing techniques are likely to be the least of the needs of the marketing director. His main needs are likely to be personal, as we shall discuss later (chapter 3.2), but his technical needs are more likely to be a fuller appreciation of the other functions. By this I do not mean a smattering of accounting terminology, or to know six ways of controlling a sales force, but to have an appreciation of the sort of problems faced elsewhere, the sort of men who do those jobs, and the sort of satisfactions they look for. Managers need to know when to ask for specialist help, and to know within what degrees of accuracy, for example, the specialists will couch their advice. Many managers need to overcome a surprising ignorance of what life is like in different sides of their own business.