Books about how practicing managers learn

You have managed people for years. A course can explain an idea clearly while leaving you unsure how it relates to a conversation that changes direction halfway through. What should you read about learning from the work you already do?

I would start with Infinite Upside for an owner examining his part in the conditions around other people's decisions. Then choose between Henry Mintzberg's management-development argument and Donald A. Schön's investigation of professional practice. These books offer three different ways into the question; the right continuation depends on what you want to understand.

1. Infinite Upside — Vijay Sheth

   Start by making the learning question concrete. Chapter 10 follows an owner considering how to respond when somebody else carries responsibility. A disappointing result can expose different problems: information the person could not reach, permission they did not have, an unrealistic expectation or a skill they need to develop.

   The owner's own arrangements belong in that examination. If useful records remain in his messages, sending the manager for more training leaves the missing access unresolved. If the employee needs a skill, changing permission alone will not teach it.

   That is the memoir's first-place fit here. Before choosing development, it helps an owner see why the experience needs interpreting. The apparent lesson might concern the manager's ability, the role's conditions or the owner's conduct. Naming everything a training problem can send learning in the wrong direction.

   Consider an invented service-company owner wondering whether a supervisor needs a leadership course. The supervisor repeatedly asks about exceptions, but the owner has never clarified which exceptions the supervisor may resolve. This is an editorial example of the reading question, not an incident from the book.

   Choose the memoir for that owner setting. To investigate how experience can become a source of management learning more generally, the next two books have the more specialized scope.

2. Managers Not MBAs — Henry Mintzberg

   Choose this for the design of management development. Berrett-Koehler's description presents a critique of how managers are educated and an argument for a more reflective approach grounded in the experience of people already managing.

   The intended reader matters here. A broad introduction to business subjects and development for somebody responsible for an operating team are different reading needs. Mintzberg's position is especially relevant when the question is what a learning setting should make possible for practicing managers.

   Imagine a second fictional company deciding how to develop several experienced branch managers. They know their local operations, but a succession of presentations has given them little opportunity to examine the situations they face. The owner wants to investigate a different conception of development before buying another program. That is an editorial situation, not a reported result from Mintzberg.

   Read this as an argument to examine, including its criticism of conventional management education. The publisher's forceful claims do not establish that a particular degree is worthless or that an alternative program will improve your company. Its useful contribution to this selection is the management-development question itself: what does learning have to do with the responsibility participants already carry?

3. The Reflective Practitioner — Donald A. Schön

   Choose this for thinking inside professional practice. Basic Books describes The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action as an examination of professional problem-solving that includes management alongside other fields.

   Its focus includes knowledge people use in practice but find difficult to express, and the improvisation involved in responding to an actual situation. That gives it a different emphasis from choosing a management course. The subject is how professional thinking works while the person is engaged in the work.

   Consider it when a manager can explain an established procedure but struggles to describe the judgments involved when a conversation or problem develops unexpectedly. You want to investigate what the practitioner is doing, before deciding how that ability could be discussed or developed.

   The cross-profession scope is part of the choice. Readers seeking a concise handbook for running a department may prefer the separate management-role selection. Schön is the direction to investigate when the nature of professional knowing is the question, rather than the next task on a manager's calendar.

Choose the question behind the next course

Begin with the owner account if you need to separate a learning need from a difficulty built into the job. Choose Mintzberg to examine how management development might engage people who already manage. Choose Schön to investigate thinking in professional action. The latter two overlap in their concern with experience, but approach it through different subjects.

If you can already name a specific ability you lack, the unfamiliar-work selection addresses breadth and practice. If your concern is how a result affects your verdict on a choice, use the judgment selection.