Management and HR development

The most exciting process and learning event however were the: “work-and-live-together” events during our 12 work-sessions, 6 experimental workshops and several visiting periods, when expertise and cultural differences met. Though some of us had a background of bi-national or multi-cultural research and field studies, the impact of the frequently used “I am I – and you are you … and I know to do my things best … and let you do yours,” then and when, became very simple traps for partner related cooperation and the hidden academic patterns of competition, authority and systematic different ways to solve problems turned into our team inherent barriers. The initial part of the documentation revolves around experiences within the team, towards the other culture and the difficulties within ourselves to appreciate intercultural or personal differences. The input of our local experts (from Austria, Germany and the Philippines), their highly developed and specialized techniques, their knowledge of expertise, as well as, the conceptual foundations in humanistic psychology or philosophical ideas were the basic work level, the contents we were dancing around, all related to the goals of an integration of management training. In the second part of this documentation, experts present their skills and ways of work and specialized backgrounds, their handling and thinking frames in relation to their role as multipliers, process facilitators, trainers or managers and offer impulses, which provided some basic steps in our process of confrontation and integration. With the goal in mind, to develop and set up a program for special management competencies for supervision, coaching and organization dynamics, we started the four years of activities. The DAAD had confirmed a sponsorship within the DIES program and the project data, in the form of a modularized system of studies and trainings is, herein, presented. In the 3rd part of this documentation, a collection of data and useful materials are assembled for colleagues who may want to work with similar sets of competencies, or who are preparing to structure and to conceptualize continuing educational trainings in countries where this field of management specialization is just entering the professional stage. In the Philippines this has been done mostly by foreigners, often without a process of enculturation, confrontation and integration into the specific cultural frames, just transporting any of the highly marketable western models, which are en vogue. A very exciting aspect of this team work was in fact the “rooting” of a strange and, in many ways, unfamiliar way of understanding and practicing management and management training within our team as well as within the experimental groups of managers and students of industrial-organizational (IO) psychology at the University of the Philippines, Diliman.