Building Management Skills through Problem Solving

Abstract

For the past two years, we have been using a different approach to the introductory management course. Our basic assumption is that knowledge alone does not make successful managers (see Figure 1). That is, managers must act or behave in a way that facilitates objective accomplishment. We therefore sought to develop behavioral skills in the introductory management course. In addition, we recognized that the job of a manager is really that of a problem solver. Thus, we defined the manager’s job as behaving in a manner which facilitates solving an array of organizational problems and set as our course objective the development of behavioral skills conducive to managerial problem solving.