The Development of Management and Leadership Capability and its ...

summarised in the following chapters shows that competence can be linked to
performance and serve a useful way of focusing learning goals.
• Many of our ideas about management and leadership capability come from work on
senior managers, and may not apply so well to junior and middle managers. There are
also limitations to the evidence base in terms of nationality (much work is American),
gender (mostly male) and race (mostly white).
Trends in management and leadership development
• Management and leadership development in the UK is provided by a complex mix of
further and higher education, and formal and informal training provided by employers. A
range of other suppliers (large and small training companies and management
consultancies, professional bodies etc) play into both the education and employer sectors.
• Nearly 100,000 qualifications in management and business are awarded each year,
including about 19,000 first degrees and 10,000 MBAs (about 7,500 of these are UK
students). There is large raft of varied vocational qualifications - NVQs, certificates,
diplomas etc. awarded in both further and higher education.
• Management training in employing organisations in the UK has been growing slowly
from a low base. Work-based learning approaches (coaching, project work etc.) are
popular with HR professionals and with individuals, but they are often difficult to support
and we have no reliable estimates of the volume of such development activity. The more
exciting and innovative approaches to management and leadership development tend to
be offered only to small populations - senior managers or those on high potential
development programmes.
3.1 The population of managers and leaders in the UK
The UK has a large number of managers and this population continues to grow.
Williams examined the 'stocks and flows' of managers in the workforce for the CEML
enquiry and estimated about 4-4.5 million people who might be said to be managers, many of
whom work in small firms (Williams, 2001). An estimated 400,000 new managers might be
required each year, of which the majority enter from other occupations. About 10% of these
entrants to management are assumed to be meeting the growth in this part of the workforce,
and the remainder are replacing retirement and other losses. So there is a continuous
challenge to supply organisations with the managers they need.
Small firms are a crucial component of the national economy. Perren and Grant (2001)
estimate SMEs as employing over 56% of the UK workforce, including over 1.75 million
managers.
A detailed analysis of the demographics of management can be found in Bosworth's paper for
the Skills Taskforce (Bosworth, 1999).
It is also important to bear in mind that many other workers not recorded as 'managers' by
occupation need management and leadership skills. Most professionals manage projects,
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