What is Europe's Most Advanced Country Doing About Management Development?
Share
The claim we'd make is that Europe's most advanced country is Finland. Yes this 5 million population outpost in the far north east of Europe. The basis for our claim? As well as being the home of Nokia, Europe's leading company (and the only non US company in Interbrand’s top ten global brands), Finland has the highest per capita use of mobile phones in Europe, the highest Internet use and in general the most hi-tech economy. Despite its small population it is also number four in the world in filing successful patents and number two in the percentage of GDP spent on R and D.
In this article we will discuss the cases of two quite different organisations that have invested heavily in management development. Both are highly successful in their own fields and exemplify the growing direction for management development in Finland.
CASE 1 FINLAND POST (SUOMEN POSTI)
Finland Post Ltd. is a 362-year-old organisation with 25,000 employees. It provides messaging and logistics services to companies, organisations and households throughout Finland and increasingly abroad. Many challenges like electronic communications and commerce are bringing large changes to this field; indeed, during recent years, the fastest growing area in messaging has been electronic and hybrid services. Finland Post has also changed from being a Government department to a business concern, becoming an independent limited company. Simultaneously the staff have undergone a change from being civil servants to professional providers of a wide range of services to customers.
Management Development Programmes in Finland Post
The 'Development Process for Potential Key Personnel', based on Self Managed Learning, was started seven years ago. Most young people with potential as senior managers or specialists have participated in this process. Programmes have lasted about one year.
The goals of the development programme have been:
- to ensure that the Post has the key resources for future development
- to improve organisational learning and adaptability between jobs
- to assist personal development and career selection
- to promote personal initiative, independence and entrepreneurship as well as the skill to learn on the job
- to ensure life-long learning.
The main concern is to help people take responsibility for their own learning. Acceptance of personal responsibility for learning means in practice the following:
The participant
- assesses their own development needs
- clarifies their own ambitions
- decides on the learning methods to be used
- is personally responsible for assessing learning
- works with others in order to achieve objectives
- and makes full use of the 'support organisation' (that is, their own manager, tutors, mentors, etc)
Programme Structure
The programme has a number of elements to it and these are described below.
Mapping
The learners make it clear to themselves from the outset what they must learn in order to cope with present and future tasks. In essence learners need to map out the direction for themselves in the context of business needs.
Some of the questions people consider in this mapping phase include:
- What is the current world situation and the outlook?
- What do we know about business development and its challenges?
- What are the Post's aims, visions, strategies, success factors now and in the future?
- What are the prospects for the unit in which I work, and what skills are needed by people working there?
- What is expected of me?
- What do I expect from life?
Part of the mapping process is carried out in group sessions using outside and in-house expertise and part of it is left to the responsibility of learning groups and the individual learner.
Strategic Learning Contract
The Strategic Learning Contract encourages the individual to connect personal aims with the aims of the organisation. The document is written by the learner to cover what they decide to learn and it draws on the mapping process.
The contract is based on the following questions (used generally in Self Managed Learning programmes):
1. Where have I been?
2. Where am I now?
3. Where do I want to get to?
4. How will I get there?
5. How will I know that I have arrived?
The contract is a means for each participant to specify what they want to learn and why - and to share this with others. The traditional training schedule in Finnish companies has been a list of courses. They have their place, too, but this programme looks for learning areas within work. People are also encouraged to use a wide range of opportunities for learning, such as travel, reading, projects, secondments and learning from others around them.
Learning group
The participants on the programme join a 5 to 6 person learning group. These groups are important both for learning skills and for the development of management and interpersonal capabilities.
The advantages of the learning group include:
* benefiting from difference
* improved learning efficiency and diversity
* more fun in learning
* improved teamwork skills
* learning to manage without assertion of authority
* learning to evaluate meeting processes and to make them more effective.
Learning groups have typically met every five or six weeks for up to a day at a time.
Large group sessions
During the programme there are large group sessions where the learning groups come together as a learning community. Additional information is supplied, and consideration is given to the information provided by senior management and the concerns regarded as important by the whole community of learners.
The whole (large) group has five sessions, of 2-3 days each, on the following themes:
- Orientation, Self Managed Learning principles and structure, and teamwork
- Business management in the Post
- Strategic thinking
- Success with customers
- Leadership
The participants are intimately involved in the planning, execution and assessment of each of these events. The content of each event is very much driven by the interests and needs of participants. They have the opportunity to listen, ask questions and investigate the views of senior management and the various experts. They also test and develop their own thoughts together with the other participants.
Supporters (line manager, mentor, tutor etc.)
The person's manager is the learner's most important supporter, assisting in the drawing up of a realistic and challenging Strategic Learning Contract. The manager also distributes information and points the learner in the direction of the right people to give assistance. It is the responsibility of the learner to get their manager to do that and to understand the Self Managed Learning process.
The mentor is also an important source of support. The mentor is usually an older and more experienced individual either from within the Post or from outside. The mentor can be a good friend and a wise counsellor. The mentor shares experience, views and skills to allow the learner to develop as a person both professionally and individually.
The most important duties of the mentor are:
- to help the learner clarify personal aims
- to help the learner recognise strengths and hidden skills
- to help the identification of development needs and the discovery of
various development methods
- to support learning by listening, asking and guiding - not by issuing
instructions.
Managers interested in mentoring these young high flyers are first given a booklet on mentoring. After reading the booklet mentors are provided with a half-day workshop in order to develop their capabilities further.
Assessment process
Assessment is an integral part of development and takes place over the whole programme duration. The first kind of assessment is of the programme itself - how is it going. At least a half a day in each large group session is spent on assessing the whole process.
In small groups participants analyse how they have progressed concerning different elements of the programme. It is most important that the learner perceives and assesses progress within work and the everyday situation. Learning groups can act as critics or sparring partners for the individual learner. Assessment has to concentrate on how we learn, not just on what we learn.
At the end of the programme the results of the learning process are presented to the senior management and other parts of the organisation. Final work can be presented either by individuals, by the learning groups or by the whole group.
Senior managers using SML
Finland Post has started a new development programme which is also based on Self Managed Learning and aimed at top management and other key personnel (in total 190 directors, senior managers and specialists). The programme basically consists of the same elements as the 'Development Process for Potential Key Personnel', including joint sessions, learning networks and individual elements.
CASE 2. THE S GROUP
The S Group consists of the 23 Finnish co-operative societies and trading companies. Group businesses include food and groceries, speciality goods, department stores, hotels and restaurants, hardware and agriculture, automobiles and service stations. It is one of the largest organisations in Finland with over 21,000 employees and a 29% market share in groceries.
IMPLEMENTING SML PROGRAMMES
Initially a pilot programme was started with one learning group of five persons. Encouraged by this pilot programme two other programmes were launched. One was an in-house programme just for managers in one group of hotels and the other open to managers from various hotels and restaurants across Finland.
SOKOS HOTELS TURKU
Two hotels in Turku (a city in western Finland) took part in a one-year programme for their hotel and restaurant managers. The management defined as the main need: to increase co-operation across traditional boundaries between those two hotels and inside each hotel. One reason was to help managers to learn more about the hotel business as a whole, including each others roles, in order to be capable any time, to quote a Finnish saying, to 'jump into the pants' of the other manager when needed. The group
identified the following targets:
* to realise and to internalise their newly-enlarged roles
* to act as a good team
* to develop leadership skills
* to manage changes better and to speed up their ability to learn
* to add openness, honesty, "us"-spirit and willingness to win to the organisational culture
The structure was similar to the one described above (in Finland Post).
OTHER PROGRAMMES
The other SML programmes in the Sokos Hotel had the following general goals:
* to take responsibility for one's own learning and to manage change
* by improving participants' learning skills to strengthen continuous learning
* to support the developing of self management and entrepreneurship in work teams
The structure itself is very similar for both hotel programmes mentioned here.
RESULTS
The best feedback from the Finland Post programme is the growing interest towards the programme and the yearly increased number of applicants. Additionally, many managers whose employees have passed through the programme have wished to have a similar type of programme for themselves. Hence Finland Post has started the development programme mentioned above. (In the S Group it has also been agreed that SML will be incorporated into their general management development strategy.)
The SML programme provided a way for the values of Finland Post to be put into practice. It has supported people in making the organisational values real, bringing them into operation in everyday work. The concept of 'Partnership Thinking' (with customers and suppliers) has also become true through people networking more effectively than previously, both inside and outside the organisation. In the past people didn't get involved with other departments. But through sharing knowledge while on the SML programme, people have come to feel responsible for the organisation as a whole, not only their little bit of it.
What kind of advantages have there been for learners?
In feedback from participants both in S Group and in the Post programmes there are the same positive outcomes for learners themselves.
Challenging goals
People usually set harder goals than their managers or programme leaders do. Especially young people seem to be very demanding; to themselves and to others. Most considered that the programmes having stretched them considerably.
Learning to learn
"We have learned to use our own thinking in learning more than before; we have learned to observe things in different ways." (One of the participants)
Through the learning group process people learn to stop, reflect, analyse and make conclusions. These are important tools to deal with personal learning throughout life. People learned more about their personal way of thinking and found their strengths and weaknesses: what is easy for me in the learning process and when do I need support from others.
Target-oriented learning has increased target-oriented action. People have also learned to see learning more comprehensively than before (not only in the form of training).
"Changes always revolutionise competitive positions and the quickest learners take the biggest advantage of them." (Jere Lahti, president of the S-Group)
Self-confidence
Efficient learning is received also from colleagues in-house, not only from authorities and gurus from outside, whom people in the beginning so easily turned to in order to learn more in any subject. At the end of the programme participants have learned to trust each other's help when trying to find knowledge and wisdom among themselves. It has increased feelings of self-confidence. This is an important development in a country like Finland where proverbs like "I am nothing - and shortly not even that" are common.
It seems growth has happened
* in self-knowledge and self-confidence
* independent initiative and courage
Entrepreneurship has been emphasised in the programmes, which means risk-taking, tolerance of mistakes and failures, and exceeding limits.
"The idea of development has become real and personal. Self-confidence and self-reliance have increased." (One of the participants)
Learning together
They have learned how to use teams and networks as a resource. People seem to feel very lonely in their managerial positions and have felt satisfied when they have possibilities to share problems and difficulties with each other. In the middle of tough times they have been able to look at tomorrow, seeing things in a longer term perspective. Working as learning groups has offered opportunity to develop various interpersonal and leadership skills.
The 'total view' has increased
In all the programmes sooner or later better understanding of the whole (own department, the whole Post, our hotel etc.) has come up as important development need. The participants experience their total view as having grown and they have realised how dependant people are on each other.
"I feel considerably more engaged in my company than before the programme started." (One of the participants in Finland Post.)
Even top management learns from active participants. After having been interviewed and challenged by them, one of the directors said after the meeting: "There were really good questions and I feel I have achieved a lot from discussions with the participants. I am not sure whether they learned from me nearly as much as I learned from them."
Leadership skills
The whole process has developed leadership and interpersonal skills; those new skills needed when leading self-managed teams or managing knowledge people. Also human understanding has changed to be more positive, which adds trust in people and facilitates empowerment.
Mentoring system works
Especially in the Post, where training and supplementary material were arranged for people starting as mentors, the mentoring process has created in interest in working this way.
What was difficult - new challenges
"In the beginning I did not understand what it was all about." (One of the participants)
Self Managed Learning (SML) as a way of learning, especially linked to a large organisation accustomed to training, has not always been easy. It is easy to understand the principles and the philosophy of SML. It is more challenging in practice for many learners.
The other major challenge has been involving all top managers, especially in programmes where people are working in different parts of the organisation. Although it is the participant's responsibility to inform their managers of the programme, in the beginning much more supportive material is needed to help managers to understand the process. In Finland Post a booklet on leadership challenges in learning organisations and self managing teams was written for the managers, and this helped them to understand their role better.
Conclusion
SML programmes in both Finland Post and the S Group have been successful. The evaluations of the programmes show that they have benefited individuals on them and their organisations. This has been recognised by top management. SML approaches have now started to develop in other Finnish organisations. We hope that SML will continue to support the impressive development of Finnish companies.
IAN CUNNINGHAM and TUULA LILLIA