Organizational Development: A Manual for Managers and ... - FPDL

communication. The resonance with the values, deep moral satisfaction at the end of the
course, would also confirm and enforce new attitudes and skills developed during the
training event.
3.6. PRE-TRAINING PREPARATION. It is vital to contact nominating institutions, communicate
with trainees’ supervisors, talk with trainees, and undertake all possible actions to ensure
that right persons are participating and that their future work may take full advantage of
training. Participation of non-relevant persons may destroy training event. On the other
hand, these pre-training contacts may create a necessary background for the follow-up and
post training support to trainees and their institutions. Unfortunately, even very good
participants from bad institutions may be not able to utilise and multiply the effect of
training. This is also worth to be taken in consideration, if there are alternatives to consider.
4. Group composition
4.1. ORIGIN. When training is planned as direct intervention in organisation’s practice, it is often
better if all participants belong to the same organisation, or at least there are groups of
participants from the same organisations. Problem Solving goes much better, when in each
group, there are at least 2-3 trainees, who share the same information. To improve relations
between politicians and executives, it is very good to have in the same group key
troublemakers from the both sides. However, when training is planned as an introduction to
the re-engineering process, it may be useful to have participants from as many different
organisations as possible to provide wider view on the possible organisational patterns. For
Time Management course, it is even better, when nobody knows anybody.
4.2. RANK. Mayors need training as well as all other officials, if not much more. But they are
usually very sensitive in term of demonstrating their disadvantages, which may be inevitable in
a course of training. Sometimes mayors are quite assertive, but often not. Worrying about how
they look like, top officials may be reserved and too cautious in mixed groups. In the same
time, other participants tend to look on mayors as the appointed leaders in the groups, and it
may prevent from the normal roles’ development and groups’ dynamic.
Therefore, it is usually better to have mayors trained in a group of mayors and vice-mayors.
Then they feel much better and demonstrate great enthusiasm and involvement. This
preliminary training of mayors gives them new understanding of certain issues and it provide a
good background for the following changes in organisations. However, even the best training
for mayors is not sufficient to ensure these changes, excluding some features of their personal
behaviour. Mayors became more open to changes and ready to facilitate them. Nevertheless,
not a lot would happen, before there is sufficient number of the actors of change.
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