Mintzberg: Judge (don’t measure) the effectiveness of manager development programs
Continuing our discussion of Mintzberg’s writing, he confronts the common question of how to measure the performance and effectiveness of management development programs in his excellent book Simply Managing.
He starts by sharing an extreme question he gets: “How much will our share price rise if we send Joanne, etc., on your program?”
His initial response: “I resist the urge to say 43 cents.”
He continues with a more serious answer: “Consider a book you had read recently: can you quantify its costs? Sure: so much money to purchase it, so many hours to read it. Good. Now, please quantify the benefits. If you can do that –– measure its impact on you –– please let me know and I will do the same for our program. As a reader… you might use an idea from [this book] five years from now without remembering its source…Can you get rid of management just because of the difficulties of measuring its performance?”
He concludes by recommending we “judge” –– not “measure” –– the effectiveness of management and the associated development programs.
What do you think? How do you judge management development programs at your organization? Is there too much focus on “measurement”?
Other posts on Prof. Henry Mintzberg’s work:
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