Learning your way to the top

Needham also notes that with management skills generally having been identified as a major need in New Zealand – particularly at middle, supervisory and first-line levels – any business is going to benefit from more skilled staff generally and more skilled managers that know how to get the best out of their people.
Not just for big business
Executive education is frequently seen as the domain of the bigger corporates; programmes such as those for Fletchers and Fairfax Publications at The University of Auckland Business School tend to reinforce this, as do the hundreds of corporate universities in the US.
But the need for small businesses to upskill their management capability and staff generally is well recognised by research, says Needham. Getting uptake is the real challenge – not just here but internationally. “SME owners are time and resource poor and focused on what needs to be done today. We need to find better ways of up-skilling that are going to work for them.”
The opportunities for executive education are huge, but career-long learning is a challenge and it requires commitment, says Peter Withers. “One of the things we notice in this environment is that people come in expecting to be taught, to be delivered education. It’s actually quite difficult to turn that concept around and get them to understand it’s up to them to take the opportunity; we provide the conditions. It requires responsibility, commitment and engagement on their part.”
Engagement, he says, is absolutely the key. “We actively screen students we think are simply here to receive, particularly in the executive area where much of the richness is in the peer dialogue and peer comparisons that go on.” The attitudinal thing again is very important in executive education, he says. “You’ve got to come in committed, engaged and prepared to take that kind of responsibility. That’s how you get a return on investment.”
One of the biggest issues is how much time you can take out of a busy executive’s schedule. “Internationally there’s a trend for courses that last two to four weeks. Once you start to push beyond four weeks it’s tough for them in today’s world.”
However, even two or three days away from day-to-day problem solving can give a company executive time to think a little and give themselves some new tools. “And think about how they lead and how they influence the company.”
For many New Zealand companies their greatest capital asset is human capital, says Withers. “So you should really go on investing in that capital in the same way as you reinvest in plant. Human capital goes on forever and it’s highly portable. To me it makes absolute sense to keep on investing.”
Patricia Moore is an Auckland-based freelance writer.