Why Management Associates is Unique?

Client comments as well as our own reflections have identified several key ways in which Management Associates differs from many management training and organizational development consultants:

Reframing vs. Training
One of Management Associates' fundamental convictions is that most leaders run into difficulties not because they don't know enough, but because the things they "know" are not being routinely acted upon in the workplace. If leaders are to grow and improve as leaders, they do not need education as much as they need to have their thinking challenged, their mental models probed, and their attitudes explored.

Challenge 
Human beings have a difficult time with their own self assessment. There is an ever present danger of self deception, or of an inability or refusal to see problems. This human dilemma takes on special significance for those in a position of organizational authority. Blindness to one's own impact is one of the more destructive features of leadership. 

Management Associates challenges the thinking of leaders, enabling them to reevaluate their role and alter their choices. This is a challenge that can be delivered most effectively by people outside the organization itself.

A Framework of Knowledge 
Leadership development is often viewed by participants as the exploration of alternative and sometimes competing leadership styles, philosophies, or schools of thought. Management Associates' approach places the discussion of leadership in a framework of research-based knowledge about how human beings function effectively in the workplace. By establishing the requirements of effective leadership through evidence and research, we foster a development process that transcends style to doing what works.

Developing the Whole Person
Warren Bennis said, "Learning to be a leader is virtually the same process as becoming an integrated and healthy person." Our approach challenges people's thinking and stimulates their capacity to reflect, not only in their roles as managers, supervisors, and organizational leaders, but also as complete human beings. Often management and leadership development is approached as though leadership comprised a set of skills. Although leaders do indeed employ identifiable skills, we believe the heart of leadership is defined by the values, attitudes, beliefs, and assumptions that the leader, as a human being, brings to bear on the tasks of leadership. 

Choice Focused Development
We challenge leaders to wrestle with the realization that as human beings we often have very little choice over what happens to us, but we have complete choice over our response to what happens to us. Outstanding leaders are distinguished not by what happens to them but rather by the choices they make in the face of their challenges. The targeted result of our training and development approach is to impact the conscious and routine choices being made by people in organizational positions of power and authority. As these choices are altered and improved, the culture changes and the system develops.

A Focus on Culture 
Truly effective leadership creates an organizational culture that stimulates and nurtures human unity, productivity, creativity, and achievement. Our training and development assistance is based on the understanding that leadership must be concerned not only about money and profits (vital as those are), but also about creating an integrated, unified system committed to making significant contributions to its customers.

Unity and Whole System Focus
Most organizations - even successful organizations - have learned to live with high levels of interpersonal and interdepartmental politics, competition, silos, turf issues, and broken communication. This disunity often originates at the very highest levels of an organization, with the most divisive fractures occurring within the executive group.

Unfortunately, we have become so accustomed to these levels of disunity and competition in organizational life that rarely is its correction a target of organizational effort. Management Associates exposes these commonly accepted levels of organizational disunity as some of the most real and demanding issues facing modern leadership.