John Bigelow Boise State University
For the past four years, I have been developing a managerial course focusing on "action skills." I am excited by the potential of this approach, even though there is a great deal to learn about how to implement it. Still, in looking at the portfolio of materials I'm using in my managerial skills course this semester (and the overstuffed resource folders taking up too much space in my file cabinets), I see the distance traveled since I started tinkering in this area. It is my learning from classroom trial and error that I would like to share in this article.
In teaching a skills course, the following questions have repeatedly come up:
• What resources are available for teaching such a course?
• What skills should be included in the course?
• How can a skills course best be conducted?
• What kind of response can be expected by students?
In the following pages, I'll address each of these in turn.
If it somehow came to pass that all Organizational Behavior courses were to be replaced by managerial skills courses, most of the current generation of textbooks would become obsolete. Which is to say, I have found no currently available textbooks suitable for teaching managerial skills.
In my view, a useful skills has four attributes: (I) it is based around explicitly identified problematic situations a person can expect to encounter in his/her early career years, (2) it provides a way of thinking about these situations which enables the person to develop effective situational action, (3) it provides opportunities for practicing situational action, and (4) it provides a means of feeding back to the person about his/ her situational effectiveness.
Theoretically-oriented texts hardly fulfill any of these characteristics; they are simply not oriented toward situational action. Experiential texts come closer in that they encourage people to learn from experience and the application of OB concepts. However, they do not identify focused skill areas for conceptual work, practice, and feedback.
In addition to theoretical and experiential OB texts, we have seen a third type of text, presented as "practical" in its orientation; e.g., Ritti and Funkhouser's Ropes to Skip and Ropes to Know (1982), and Schermerhorn et al. 's Managing Organizational Behavior (1982). Even though such texts may provide a more realistic view of organizations, or get people thinking about what to do in some specific situations, I have yet to see a text of this type which carries through to the actual practicing of effective situational action.
Now, this is not to say that a managerial skills course focuses only on action and slights managerial thinking. The more I teach the course, the more I appreciate the importance of establishing a solid cognitive framework for managerial action. The thinking aspect is crucial because in the complex situations managers encounter, there are no simple rules as to when to apply a particular skill. Indeed, if applied at the wrong time, a skill such as active listening, persuasion, or conflict resolution, can be irrelevant or destructive. Consequently, it is essential that people have a solid cognitive appreciation of a situation, its contingencies, and the consequences that can radiate from one's actions. In complex situations then, a cognitive understanding is prerequisite to effective action.
One reason people may have the impression of a dichotomy between cognitive and action skills may be linguistic. When the Accreditation Research Committee began studying the question of what should be included in a business school curriculum, they subdivided the task. A subcommittee was set up to examine what cognitive component should be studied in schools of business. Then, recognizing that something was left over, another subcommittee was set up on— ummm—well, non-cognitive skills. In a phone conversation last year, Jerry Zoffer, chairman of the Accreditation Research Committee, told me in no uncertain terms that the term "non-cognitive skills" was no longer considered appropriate. In more recent publications (e.g., the 1981 Accreditation Research Committee Report and the 1982 article in Newsline), it appears that the term has been replaced with "skills and personal characteristics," or worse yet, "SAPC's." However, I understand that one can use the term "action skills" with these folks without overly disrupting the conversation. In any event, I hope this linguistic change lessens the implication that actors are not thinkers.
But back to the question of resources. I know of only two sets of materials which are more or less available to those wanting to teach a managerial skills course. I have worked with both, and, interestingly enough, I learned about them at Organizational Behavior Teaching Conferences. The first is David Whetten and Kim Cameron's managerial skills materials which they have been developing mainly for the undergraduate courses at the University of Illinois. I learned of their work when David was on a panel on non-traditional approaches to teaching organizational behavior at the 1980 OBTC, University of Southern California. At that time he was using a limited production publication of a set of readings as a text. I contacted him to arrange that a number of texts would be produced for my students; David also sent me a semi-organized sheaf of teaching notes, which he distributes to his graduate studentteachers. Since then, Scott-Foresman has agreed to publish his text—and gave me pre-publication permission to use some of his materials in my junior level Organizational Behavior course.
One thing I like about this text is the context in which it is being developed. The course is largely taught by graduate students, meaning that semi-skilled people are using it. This has led to a set of materials that are well tested, straightforward, and easy to apply —an important consideration when one is thinking about multiple sections of a course. Another attraction is their well thought-out approach to how skill learning is accomplished. They have set up a multiple step learning model, starting with introduction to concepts, and progressing through a series of steps to skill practice in actual situations.
In general, this book more than adequately fills all my criteria for a skills text. It is readable and practicerelevant, and the pacing is about right. I found its credibility and acceptance by my students to be high and I am looking forward to the final version of the text and the instructors material when it is published next spring.
The second set of materials that I have tried emanated from Jim Waters, at McGill. Jim did a session on a "practical exam" at the 1982 OBTC at Case Western Reserve University. I thought that was a nifty idea, and persuaded him to send me his exam and teaching materials. Jim's materials are more like a set of independent readings, which might be difficult for a new teacher to pick up, but no problem for anyone with some experience in teaching managerial skills. The action exam is expecially useful. I administer the exam during finals week by meeting individually with each student for about 15 minutes, and running through a series of short scenarios requiring the student to apply skills taught in the course. As they do so, I score their performance, using a checklist.
I've used this as the sole exam (a group project and two individual learning papers also contribute to their grades) for three classes now, and plan to continue with that format. It has two definite advantages. First, it gets the message across to students that the focus is on effective action—not just on writing about it. I think this gives a boost to students' motivation to learn the skills, as opposed to preparing for a written examination on them. Second, I intuitively feel good about the validity of this exam—better, in fact, than I have felt about any other. I like the face-to-face quality of the exam, and feel that I have learned something about what the nerson has learned during the semester. h4>What Skills Should Be Included in the Course?/h4> This is a thorny topic which has yet to be settled to my satisfaction. I know of four studies which are helpful in developing a list of competencies for a skills course.
Dunnette (1971) reviewed the literature and asked industrial managers what behaviors they believed to be critical to managerial success. The result was a list of 34 trait, motivational, and behavioral variables; e.g., divergent thinking, oral communication skills, energy, personal impact, perception of social cues, need achievement, desire to lead, inner work standards, primacy of work, behavioral flexibility, resistance to stress, tolerance of ambiguity, and social awareness.
Based on testimony of an expert panel and an extensive literature review, the American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business identified six clusters of skills and personal characteristics (1980). These included administrative skills, interpersonal skills, intellectual ability, stability of performance, work motivation, and values of business. (I've noticed that many of the terms of Dunnette's study reappear in the AACSB study.) The AACSB list increases the legitimacy for anyone attempting to teach action skills —at least in accredited schools. However, I think other lists have at least as much credibility.
Based on analysis of over 2,000 interviews with managers from a variety of organizations, Boyatzis (1982) identified five interrelated clusters of competencies which in varying degrees distinguished superior managers from average or below average managers. These competency clusters include leadership, human resource management, goal and action management, and directing subordinates.
Finally, Whetten surveyed his management classes (which contain a high proportion of experienced managers) over several years to determine which skills they regarded as most important for managers. His findings were used to generate the skill areas for his managerial skills course. His topic areas include personal awareness and life management, decision making and problem solving, verbal and non-verbal communication, gaining and using power, conflict management, motivating and supervising subordinates, working in groups, and orchestrating change.
Anyone inclined to critique these studies will easily find gaping threats to the validity of any. It worries me that the AACSB action skill list, given the limitations of the methodology used in its development, is gaining so much prominence. But rather than the field settling on one agreed-on list, it is probably preferable during this developmental period that people experiment with different ways to organize the material.
These studies identify a number of competencies which could conceivably be included in a skills course. It's clear to me that the numbers of competencies described are many more than can be adequately dealt with in a single course—or even in a series of courses. My basis for saying this is threefold. First, the list of competencies is quite extensive, even when redundancies are eliminated. Second, the competencies tend to be generally stated, and actual course design often winds up unravelling several facets to a single competency (consider, for example, that the entire art of public speaking is contained in the competency of oral communication skills). My third basis is that I have found a skills course proceeds at a significantly slower pace than other courses. I would estimate that less than half of class time is spent in gaining a cognitive appreciation of the action skill. At least this same amount needs to be then spent in activities providing students with some ability to use the skill. Skill learning activities are timeconsuming because they require individual practice in situations, followed by careful feedback. If at least half the class time is spent in skill learning, the course can cover at most half the topics that a corresponding cognitively-focused course could—it took me several terms of overambitious schedules to fully appreciate this.
Given the overabundance of potential skill topics as compared to the limited amount of time I have to cover them, I have resorted to some subjective criteria for selecting what I include. My first criterion has to do with teachability in a classroom setting. Some of the competencies are concerned with attitudes (e.g., primacy of work) and learned needs (e.g., need for achievement). Aside from my discomfort at the thought of trying to change students' values and needs, I think that this kind of learning cannot be accomplished very well through classroom learning activities. In addition, I have found some topics more appropriate to my students than others. For example, I have stopped teaching about stress management, since most of them are doing quite well physiologically with their all-nighters and cramming. I think that it will only be later in their careers when their physiology is less robust and the stress more chronic that they will choose to face up to stress management—and then anything I have taught them now will be long forgotten (this, of course, may not be true for an older student population.) I have also tinkered with political skills, but stopped when I realized that most of that area involved analytical and cognitive knowledge without a lot of action skill required.
Another criterion I have used is to include skills which complement each other. The Boyatzis study suggested that there are "clusters" of competencies. I have tried to include skill topics in a schedule which allows later skills to build on earlier ones; e.g., first listening skills, then interviewing skills.
Anyway, I am now following a convergence of some of the AACSB areas, the Boyatzis areas, and the Waters syllabus. This semester I will spend a week or two on each of these topics: feedback and active listening, interviewing and mentoring, running a group meeting, interpersonal conflict, public speaking, negotiation and persuasion, motivating others, time management and delegation, creativity, and acting effectively in uncertain situations. How Can a Managerial Skills Course Best be Conducted?
A great deal of skill training is presently going on, much of it outside of academia and there seems to be a fair amount of convergence as to the steps that a skill training sequence may contain. The following general steps are followed, more or less, by the McBer competency workshops, Development Dimensions International interaction modeling workshops, and the Whetten Skill Modules:
1. Skill preassessment.
2. Cognitive learning about competency.
3. Modeling via case, film, videotape, or live role play.
4. Skill assessment and feedback (in conjunction with skill practice).
5. Skill practice.
6. Integration via simulations, creating incidents requiring competencies, or skill
application assignments.
7. Planning for future use of skill.
It is generally the case that the private sector has more money to spend on each participant than we at the university have. The real challenge to doing skill training in the classroom is to design some reasonably effective variation of this sequence which is practicable for one instructor in a classroom of 30-40, without a lot of money for materials. Below, I will make a few comments on my efforts in the classroom to implement each of these steps.
1. Skill Preassessment. I think this is important since the results give students a sense of where they need to focus their efforts. The process of assessment is also helpful in enabling students to assess themselves more accurately—one of the managerial competency areas. Ideally, I would preassess each of my students on each of the skills, and have them focus on the areas in which they are weak. However, the means I use to measure skill competence are so time consuming that I have not carried out this step. Whetten uses instruments and a self-testing procedure in his units. Right now, I am resisting any temptation to backslide to those written instruments, though maybe they are appropriate for self-assessment. This is definitely a promising area for someone to develop....
2. Cognitive Learning. This step is probably the one most familiar to a university setting. As I discussed earlier, the problem is to find cognitive material which provides a solid and comprehensive springboard for developing concrete, situational action. Materials which provide only a feeling of understanding the situation, or point to action steps not influencible by the person, are not helpful. I use reading assignments, lecturettes, and analysis of examples to accomplish this step.
3. Modeling. I think it is very helpful for students to see how someone can use a competency in handling a situation. I have used cases in this capacity; for example, a transcript of someone handling a feedback session. I have thought for some time that it would be extraordinarily helpful to have a repertoire of videotaped models for use in the class. These might be of people handling situations both competently and less competently. However, I have yet to get around to investing the considerable amount of time it would require to obtain the equipment, set up the situations, and do the videotaping.
At the 1983 OBTC in Norman, Oklahoma, Jim Waters commented that he does his modeling live, in the class, with students. In thinking about this, it occurs to me that this makes a lot of sense. Aside from eliminating the need for the video work, it puts the instructor on the line, and—assuming that person is not incompetent—adds to his/her credibility. In fact, perfection is not required. A slip here and there adds interest to the assessment, and sends the message that it is all right to make mistakes and learn from them.
Still, I see live modeling as a fairly sophisticated skill. People who are not confident in their ability to model competencies are probably better off initially to use "canned" models, such as cases, films, and videotapes. However, the longer I teach this course, the more confident I feel that I can reasonably model the competencies involved. If this increasing confidence through experience is true for others, inexperienced instructors may prefer to begin with "canned" models, and, as they gain experience and confidence, move toward live modelin; as their sreferred method.
4. Skill Assessment and Feedback. I have identified this as a distinct step, since I think that an adequate assessment procedure for measuring behavioral skills is essential both to the learning of the skill and to the motivation of grade-oriented students for learning the skill—as opposed to learning how to pass a test only vaguely related to actual skill learning. I do not know of any written exams which can adequately measure behavioral skills, so I am putting great emphasis on assessment through their demonstration in action.
How is this done? In privately-sponsored training an internal evaluator, trained in competency assessment, may personally assess the competencies of participants. Alternatively, some external service may be contracted to conduct the assessment. The assessment of competencies can be a very involved process. McBer uses lengthy checklists, which it trains people to use. A rater's ratings are compared with others to ensure a suitably high interrater reliability before the person is certified. The American Management Association's competency workshops do their testing by sending videotapes of participants to McBer, and having them do the competency assessments.
When I first learned how competencies are assessed, I was very concerned about whether or not this rather expensive and time-consuming technology could be imported into the classroom. Even if an instructor could learn how to assess competencies (and I doubt if McBer will share its measurement technologies without financial incentive), could an instructor find the time in a class of 30-40 to do this kind of measurement?
I recently had an opportunity to spend a day at McBer, studying their competency assessment techniques. While I could not gain expertise in that day, my visit had the effect of demystifying their techniques. Essentially what they do is carefully apply a behavioral checklist. Anyone familiar with a skill can generate such a checklist, and use it to measure a person's ability to apply a skill in a situation. I would recommend the following books for those interested in doing this: Pottinger and Goldsmiths' Defining and Measuring Competence (1979), Winter et al.'s book on competencies in the liberal arts (1981), and Grant et al.'s voluminous "On Competence" (1979).
If instructors design their own checklists, the main thing that would be lost is reliability between schools; we wouldn't know if the same skill is being taught in each place. This is an inevitable and probably desirable first step in implementing action skill courses. Once a number of courses are established, it would be a relatively easy step to start sharing testing procedures among schools, and to start thinking about how course scores might feed into AACSB accreditation. In addition to developing my own competency testing checklists (although I still rely a lot on Jim Water's checklists), I have in essence delegated a lot of skill feedback work to student groups. I see this as both a necessary step in order for students to get the feedback they need in their skill development, and also an educationally desirable thing to do. By teaching students how to assess competencies displayed by others, I increase their capability to assess their own competency and thus their potential for developing themselves after the course is over. In addition, it gives them practice in working with, giving feedback to, and helping in the development of others. All of these activities are easy to justify from the list of competencies seen as desirable in business school graduates.
The major means I have developed for student feedback is the skill practice triad, and I will say more about this in the next section.
5. Skill Practice. I think that the essence of a skill learning course is the opportunity for every student to practice the skills involved, and to get feedback as to his/her performance. There are a number of ways to create situations in which students may practice various skills. These include simulations, role plays, interviews, class presentations, homework exercises, work group per evaluation, and in-basket exercises. I've had fun trying out various kinds of activities. This semester, for example, Roy Glen and I are running the "Looking Glass" managerial simulation developed by the Center for Creative Leadership. I'm intrigued by the skill practice possibilities of in-basket and interlocking in-basket exercises "Looking Glass" is an example of the latter). I have developed an interlocking in-basket group-level case on ambiguity which I am moderately pleased with, and use individual homework assignments for skill practice in creativity (modeled somewhat after the Synectics creativity training format which I used as a Peace Corps training consultant).
One format which I find I am relying on more and more is the "skill practice triad." The way it works is that I develop three short skill practice scenarios, each involving an interchange between the skill practicer and one other. I divide the class into triads and have them choose roles; two go through the interchange, and the third person acts as a coach (of course, we cover skill recognition and coaching before this). The group then rotates roles and repeats the process, until everyone has had a chance to practice the skill and to get feedback about it.
I have developed a number of skill practice exercises around this format. For example, a feedback exercise, an active listening exercise where the skill practicer attempts to parallel the responses given on a transcript of a skilled active listener, an exercise in surfacing hidden agendas using active listening techniques, a conflict resolution situation, a persuasion situation, and an interview situation.
I am beginning to see these skill practice triads as the "bread and butter" of my managerial skills course's classroom activities. My students respond well to them, and seem to learn from them. The "coach" role is a particularly critical one so it is important to have this role reasonably well carried out. For this reason, I am thinking of moving to "skill practice quartets" where two people carry out the coach role. This would increase the amount of time spent on a practice activity by a third, but would increase the likelihood that a skill practicer would get good feedback. One problem: laziness—I just have not gotten around to it.
6. Integration. We know that in practice, competencies are used in concert, and a person who has mastered competencies individually may still not be able to apply them well in combination—sort of like learning the notes, but still not being able to play the song. Consequently, having learned individual competencies, a person must go on to learn how to integrate their use in a complex situation.
I must admit that I haven't done as much with integration as I could. I have instructed student skill evaluators to be aware of the potential for using previously learned skills in a practice situation, and to coach around those as well. Eventually I would like to develop a course in which some holistic situations are created at the end which require the use of all the skills in the course. A management simulation of some sort might be the best way of doing this. Maybe "Looking Glass" is the answer.
7. Planning for Future Use of Skills. In executive development, skill training can occur in the context of "back-home" problems and a workshop can end with some specific planning for applying the learned skills. Many students, however, have no "back home" work setting and having them plan applications for some far uncertain future takes away from the usefulness of this concluding activity. But it is not too hard to identify ways that the learned skills can be used in the student's (a) continuing course work, (b) university-related activities, and (c) home/dorm and social life. If students can be encouraged to practice their learned skills in these areas, I think it is more likely that they will retain them for use eventuallv in work organizations.
Jim Waters has students anonymously assess their experience just after they have completed their practical exam. I have kept this assessment in my courses, and have two semesters worth of results. In general, the comments are very positive and consistent with my sense of how Jim Waters reports that his students at McGill respond.
To paraphrase, students most often say: "I found the course very credible, and I thought it was one of the most useful courses I've had here. Why aren't more courses taught this way? I found the action final uncomfortably stressful, and worry about 40 percent of my grade resting on a 15-minute interaction."
I can't overstress the credibility. When I was teaching an experiential course, students very often questioned the validity of what we were doing. This led me to seek ways to make the course more credible (for example, by using more business examples, relating the material to specific business applications, and dressing up more formally than I normally do). But none of these problems which occurred in experiential courses have appeared in my management skills courses. I think the course's credibility stems from the amount of research that supports it, the AACSB's activities, the tendency for most business people to support the idea of the course, and the fit that the course's approach seems to have with the learning styles of many students. I would also emphasize the heightened anxiety level of students in the course. They spend much of their time on-line, as opposed to sitting back and listening to the instructor, and there is always that practical exam looming at the end. Still many of the students I have talked with see this as bad tasting medicine which will ultimately be good for them. They recognize that, although the experience is stress-producing, it is credible preparation for an even more stress-producing situation: their business career.
One caveat: I have been teaching this course as one section of a multiple section offering and have noticed a "selection effect" at the beginning of the semester as students who are really threatened by the format transfer out into other, less threatening sections. This means that my feedback is from a nonrandom population of students who are probably more likely to be favorably inclined toward the course. Were all the sections to be taught the same way, the feedback might not be so uniformly positive.
At both Oregon State University and Boise State University I have received support from the Chairman and the Dean for teaching the course on an experimental basis. I have not yet pushed for institutionalizing the course into the management curriculum because of the need to develop my own approach and the lack of published materials useable by relatively inexperienced instructors. With my own development and with the coming out of the Whetten text, a multisection offering becomes feasible. Obviously, I will be getting into an entirely new set of issues when I ask other instructors to agree to curriculum changes.
These curriculum issues concerning what and how to teach in organizational behavior classes do not stop with the school and university; there is an ongoing debate in the field as well. The more I teach the skills course, the more I appreciate that the organizational behavior domain extends far beyond the teaching of these basic skills. People such as Peter Vaill at George Washington University and J. B. Ritchie at Brigham Young University have developed what I consider excellent organizational behavior courses which focus on the ability of people to think intelligently and to make sense out of puzzling, complex situations.
Right now, if I could design two organizational behavior courses for a business school core, I would start the iunior year with a managerial skills course, which would be a prerequisite for a managerial "sense making" course (in Karl Weick's sense) at the senior level. Two courses are not enough, but then we never seem to have enough time to thoroughly perambulate our perimeters....
Well, that is about it. I have talked about some of the major questions which have been on my mind as I tinkered with an action skills course. One think about it—I never get tired of teaching that course. Its high relevance to students, along with my own ongoing learning and experimentation, has kept me excited about it for four years now. I think that others would find a course of this type equally exciting.
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