• End the use of the "soft/hard skills" distinction. What we have often referred to as "soft skills" are really productivity improvement skills. Interpersonal communication, coordination and collaboration are the basis of organizational productivity. Referring to these as "soft skills" demeans their importance and value.
• Tie education objectives to corporate objectives. Ask how management education can best serve and support the company’s current and future objectives. Unless you can make or argue this connection, management education will never be looked upon as relevant and important. In one situation, an IT services company demonstrated that, with an investment in high-level consultation and relationship skills development for its management team, it was able to significantly increase the company’s client revenues and decrease the number of delivery errors and customer complaints within a matter of months.
• Seek strategic investments in management education, making it "just in time" rather than "just in case." Ask what new thinking, attitudes, behaviors and actions are necessary right now to help the company move forward right now in its mission. Then target management development specifically towards those desired outcomes. In another example, a company was experiencing inordinate turnover in its front-line staff due to their feelings of being poorly treated by their managers. By quickly providing those managers with effective methods and tools to immediately improve the ways they manage their staff’s performance, they were able to curtail that bleeding in their human resources.
• Collect both objective and anecdotal information as to the value that education has provided your managers. Performing surveys not just immediately after seminars/workshops, but also two to three months afterward, can measure the impact of your education endeavors. Consider four types of measures: 1) customer measures (turnover, level of quality and service), 2) operational measures (productivity, efficiency), 3) financial measures (revenues, expenses, profit contributions, etc.) and 4) human (turnover, absenteeism, etc.). And, if the impact you seek is not there, then redesign (rather than cut out) what you are doing so that results are forthcoming.
• Package management education into different formats. Don’t just depend on single or multi-day programs to be your mainstay. Repackage materials into short two- to three-hour seminars. Use the short sessions to give people the overview, and to get them interested in larger programs. Also, sometimes managers just need a short reminder or refresher rather than a larger, time-consuming program.
• Compliment classroom education with other methods to reduce overall cost. Computer-based education can be good for theory delivery, followed by workshops to practice those developing skills. Also, education sections on a company’s web site, or list-serves that serve course participants, can be used to post best practices or to continue problem solving dialogues after education has been completed. One company even cut back on some classroom education and worked to provide individual and group telephone coaching on challenging work situations as a follow-up to any significant training event. Thereby, they not only worked to share and reinforce learning, but also kept trainer cost down.
• Find creative ways to incorporate education into other meetings, conferences and events. For example, performing a short, relevant piece on meeting management can be useful at the beginning of, or just before, an important management gathering in order to make that meeting more productive. Even better, having the educator act as a facilitator during the meeting may not only increase the meeting’s productivity but also enhance people skillfulness at running future meetings.
• Always ask what’s the best way for your company’s management to learn to do their jobs better. Focus education efforts towards the ways people like to take-in learning, which can be anywhere from having group discussion, to solving real problems, to examining case studies, to acquire survey feedback, to obtaining personal coaching, etc. Be sure to involve management in choosing the methods that they will respond to best.
• Always involve education sponsors (company executives that hold budget dollars for management education) in what they can do before, during and after management education events in order to obtain the best value for their limited education resources.

In today’s fast-paced and uncertain world, having company owner/executives pay attention to management development can be a challenge. However, it’s important to stand up for management education and to find ways to easily incorporate it into what the organization needs to do every day. Also, the problem sometimes lies less in an owner/executive’s not seeing management education as worthwhile, but in demonstrating its value to them, as per some of the suggestions above.


Harvy Simkovits, CMC, President of Business Wisdom, works with owner managed companies to help them grow, prosper and continue on by offering innovative approaches to business development, company management, organization leadership and learning, and management education. He can be reached at 781-862-3983 or .