Continuous learning and the management of change

The author deals with the problem faced by Lever Brothers Ltd, a company within the Unilever Group, in training graduate management trainees to manage change in an era in which subordinates increasingly challenge management decisions and those decisions themselves are less confidently made.
One response was to include in the first-year management training programme a week-long Study Group, guided but not led by a process consultant, and dedicated to exploring possible changes in the company's personnel management policies necessary to meet expected changes in the social and economic climate.
Over the years the format and detailed objectives of this Study Group have changed but as a result of the flexibility of the format and the openness of the transactions much has been learned on how to manage change. Trainees have learned, for exarnple, that learning must be viewed as part of work and not something added on, that group learning is possible and desirable, that people learn in different ways, and that managing a technical operation involves managing a social group. The paper also discusses the role of the trainer in such free-ranging group processes and the need to integrate what has been learned in training sessions with the real world of operations.
The author concludes by emphasising that the most important lesson learned by trainees is that managing the process of the Study Group was an essential part of managing its task. From this experience they also learnt the more important lesson that process review is basic to managing in real life.