The Management and Leadership Nexus: Dynamic sharing of practice and principle

Lew Perren and John Burgoyne

Our investigations have shown gaps in communication and practice across the spectrum of management and leadership activities and development opportunities . The sharing of knowledge and actions occurs in small isolated enclaves that rarely communicate effectively with outsiders. Small businesses develop their own informal practice and language that is normally separate from the more formal activities of business support and education institutes . Professional bodies espouse the virtues of management and leadership, but few provide develop opportunities in this area . Government sponsors the development and maintenance of standards for management, but they become rigid and de-coupled from practice resulting in low take-up . A plethora of management and leadership initiatives are offered, but rather than leading to an effective matching of need to opportunity, they lead to information overload, confusion and infighting .

Clearly, there is a need for a management and leadership framework to offer a dynamic nexus to share practice and principle across the enclaves of activity. Sharing learning between employers, employees, providers and other parties is vital, but it needs to be flexible so it can be tailored to contexts, accepted by all parties and adaptive to the dynamic nature of the environment. In short it needs to be an 'enabling framework not a restricting cage'.

The solution is a flexible web-based framework that is used to map management and leadership abilities, practice and development opportunities. It needs to be used by individuals to evaluate their abilities, by employers to build their own frameworks, by Sector Skill Councils (SSC) to embed management and leadership within their provision, and by Further and Higher Education institutes to inform their course development. Such a dynamic framework would become a nexus that joins communities of practice together and it should dynamically learn from the inputs of those communities and therefore adapt to needs in real-time.