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The Salisbury Consulting Group has recently launched its five-dimensional management training concept, which has applications for managers, teams and employees. Belinda Gallon reports.
Five-dimensional management (5DM), based on the principle that everyone is a manager and focusing on managing people the way they need to be managed, is an innovative technique in management training which is set to challenge conventional thinking.
It has been developed by the Salisbury Consulting Group which employs 20 consultants in recruitment, research, communication and marketing services for organizations in the construction, property, engineering and pharmaceutical sectors, with clients including Glaxo, 3M, Fisons and IBM.
As the basis for developing 5DM, Rod Unger, a Salisbury director and originator of the concept, claims that, in the past, management training has been too rigid.
"The concept involves adopting a totally new attitude to man-management", he explains. "Rather than focusing solely on skills, 5DM recognizes that it is also vital to know yourself in order to manage others. People who are unhappy with the way they are managed will not perform at their best, so the onus must be on the manager to 'manage' well and not on the person to be managed well."
Need for Change
Working for many years in management consultancy for a wide range of businesses, there are not many management problems that Rod Unger has not come across. With the current dramatic changes affecting virtually every industry in the developed world, these, he argues, have become significantly more pronounced and of much greater importance. Open marketplaces, for example, have increased the pressure to be more competitive.
Most people in the working environment now have greater responsibility than they had a few years ago. Managers have a wider range of people, both internally and externally, with whom they have to interact or manage on a regular basis, and the flattening of management pyramids has demanded enhanced management skills from a greater number of people.
The managers of today also have to manage people without having executive authority over most of those with whom they interact, which requires a whole new range of skills. According to Salisbury Consulting, 5DM recognizes and directly addresses this problem. A business today has to be efficient to survive and to achieve that, everyone in...