Excellent Managers & Leaders - Meeting the Need: Consultation paper

Published April 2002

Overview

How bad (or good) is British management? Does it matter? Are we really short of business leaders? Just three of the questions that led to the creation of the Council for Excellence in Management and Leadership.

Probably none of them can be answered definitively. I suspect that, like British companies, the best of our managers are as good as those anywhere in the world, but we have a long tail of under-performers. Intuitively, the quality of management must be an element in our productivity performance, which clearly leaves something to be desired. And the financial press shows day by day that finding leaders for our major organisations is increasingly difficult.

But if the Council ’s work over the past year has not provided definitive answers, it has enabled us to pull together a vast amount of data not previously available in any one place. What this shows very clearly is the scale of the mis-match between supply and demand in the management area.

This paper outlines our main findings to date and suggests some solutions. But it is intended, above all, to provide the basis for a constructive dialogue. We hope this will enable us to determine how best we can do three things:

Increase the commitment of organisations of all sizes,in both the private and the public sector,to develop better managers and leaders;
Ensure that we have business education that is world-class and meets the real needs of tomorrow’s managers; and
Improve the ability of both individuals and organisations to find the right development opportunities to enhance our national competitiveness.