The Hindu Business Line : Shadowing a manager

AN INTERNATIONAL non-profit set-up, styling itself Trans-Action Partners and located in London, and into management education, consultancy and training, has taken upon itself the mission of enabling selected students of business administration in different countries to acquire focussed, high-quality, work experience by arranging short-duration "manager-shadowing" programmes.

The moving spirits, now on a visit to India, behind this laudable initiative are Prof Ed Berman, MBE, Chief Executive of UK-based Inter-Action, which engages youths in constructive, nation-building activities to protect them against social ills and evils and runs the Social Enterprise Foundation supporting micro-business through creativity, and Ms Maureen Guirdham, a marketing professional and academic specialist and author of leading university textbooks in work communication.

Manager-shadowing is precisely just that: Being the shadow of a designated manager in a well-run business organisation known for its range of operations and social commitment for a specified term, during which the student gets the opportunity to watch him at work and play to get an idea of his way of handling issues, solving problems and maintaining inter-personal relations.

No doubt, this is an effective method of bringing to life, through close and personal observation of human beings in actual work-a-day ambience, the expositions in text-books on leadership skills, personality development, time management and getting the best out of the members of one's team.

This method of providing the students with a ring-side view of the application of concepts and precepts to concrete situations by managers held in regard as efficient performers can certainly help remedy the deficiency of students passing out of business administration courses being found unequal to the exacting demands of real-life situations in work-places.

It is already the practice of educational institutions in India to have students attached for two or three months to corporate enterprises as interns.

However, the difference between putting the student through this kind of familiarisation process and manager-shadowing is that instead of merely carrying out, in an impersonal and functional sense, projects relevant to the courses of studies, the students find the guru-shishya mode implicit in manager-shadowing a far more enduring learning experience.

B. S. RAGHAVAN

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