Across 13 countries in Europe, nearly 2,500 managers at Fujitsu Services, the Japanese- owned IT services company, have been going back to school for one day each year at the Fujitsu Management Academy.
Next month, at centres across the continent, facilitators working in 11 different languages will begin taking groups of up to 20 Fujitsu managers through a day’s discussion of team development. This is the last of three modules – “straight talking and genuine listening” was the subject of module one in 2005, while last year’s day was spent discussing leadership.
As corporate universities or academies go, the Fujitsu Management Academy is unusual. First, for the scale of the programme – it covers junior, middle and senior managers. “If you have a direct report, you will be invited to attend,” says Paula Graham, the academy’s programme manager. Second, it is very democratic. “We needed to touch a large group of people in as short a space of time with the same content,” says Ms Graham. Apart from adapting the scenarios for some role-playing sessions to the different needs of junior, middle and senior managers, the content is the same for all. “A lot of businesses focus on elites, and the MBA is for elites,” says Jeremy Hill, managing director in London of the Danish Leadership Institute (DIEU), which designed the programme and taught the first two modules. “But many organisations are realising that they are not doing enough for the rest of their people.” Fujitsu Services recognised this need because the feedback it was receiving, both internally and externally, suggested the people management skills of its managers were variable, says Ms Graham. But, following the restructuring and reorganisation that turned the old ICL into Fujitsu, the company had to control its costs, too, so any spending on management development needed to have greater impact.
The past few years, therefore, have seen ever-increasing numbers of Fujitsu Services managers becoming involved in development programmes. For example, 200 people took part in a DIEU programme that cost the company the same to run as a previous course for 30 potential high-fliers. Next came a one-off, one-day programme for 2,400 managers that Ms Graham calls “a quick race round people management activities”.
But the company felt it still needed to do more intensive work on its people management qualities and worked with DIEU to design the academy’s programme.
No business school could remotely handle the numbers that the company wanted to put through the academy but in any case, Fujitsu Services’ priorities for the academy were much more focused on the behavioural side of management – a DIEU speciality – than in strategy or finance.
The cost of working with a business school would also have been prohibitive – even a day a year for all its managers, spread over three years, involves an investment of several million pounds for Fujitsu Services. For this reason, a lot of thought went into the design of the programme, to ensure it was effective. Over an intensive three-month period, staff were interviewed to ensure the content exactly matched the company’s priorities.
In the delivery phase of the programme, ensuring the facilitators – two for each one-day session – are up to the mark, has been crucial, says Mr Hill. “The time period is very short, so the facilitators have got to be very high quality, because if you haven’t got people with you at 11am, you’ve probably lost them for the rest of the day – intellectually they’re gone.”
From the outset, Fujitsu Services has had a clear idea of how it wanted the academy to be run. ICL had a long tradition of working with many institutions and this “best-of-breed” approach has continued. DIEU ran the first two modules but the final one is being taught by Oxygen Learning.
A key element of the programme is “360-degree feedback”, which enables managers to gather feedback on their leadership behaviours from their manager and peers and to compare that feedback with their perception of themselves as leaders.
The academy has no permanent classrooms, but it is not a virtual institution either. Even though it is an IT company, Fujitsu Services has preferred a classroom-based approach, says Ms Graham. With a “rocky foundation” to contend with in some areas of its people management, it felt that a face-to-face approach, with written materials for participants to take away with them, would be more effective than distance-learning using the internet. As Mr Hill notes, one problem with distance learning is that it can be difficult to know who has done what, and how much they have absorbed.
The decision to use local languages rather than English was also important. On most issues, says Ms Graham, individual countries work as countries within Fujitsu Services. Although the academy programme is Europe-wide, there would be a question over some managers’ understanding of English, she says. “It isn’t fair to ask them to sit through a day’s programme in English.” Besides, holding the sessions at country level keeps travel arrangements simple and reduces both costs and the time managers are away from their offices.
Results have so far been encouraging, says Ms Graham. Feedback from employees indicates they believe the quality of their managers has improved.
It seems highly unlikely, therefore, that the academy will close its doors at the end of the year. A fourth module is a possibility for next year, and as new managers arrive it may repeat early modules on a monthly basis.
The academy, says Ms Graham, is “like a train that won’t stop” – although she hastens to qualify the simile by stressing that, far from being out of control, it is “chugging along at a speed that can bring people on board, and not give them too much information at once”.
