The Maturity Institute (MI) was established to help professionalise management; to become akin to what the UK’s General Medical Council is to professional medicine. Both institutions have had to work very hard to protect our professionally-trained, practitioners from imitation. This is what the British Medical Journal article ‘The movement toward the professionalization of medicine.’ has to say on the issue: –
“The second problem related to competition from unqualified practitioners. Here the conventional argument within the profession was that medical education was an investment and that unqualified practitioners were denying those who were qualified a legitimate return on that investment. Qualified practitioners also pointed to the harm that unqualified practitioners allegedly did to patients…”[i]
Since 2015 the Maturity Institute has been building its own movement towards the professionalization of management and now we are having to protect our own professionally trained members because the incidence of imitation is rising.
We see no difference between medicine and mature, professional management: both fields should adopt exactly the same, scientific, evidence-based principles. MI trains managers, from all disciplines, to be able to measure, and externally and objectively verify, their highest professional standards. We fully recognise, acknowledge and adhere to the principle that: –
“[that] there can only be one science of management behavior”[ii]
The Maturity Institute aims to become is the established quality mark of that science. So when we meet managers, consultants and advisers who do not acknowledge this principle, or fail to meet our standards of Total Stakeholder Value capitalism[iii], we aim to help and encourage them to develop mature, professional practice.
Unfortunately, there is still a very long way to go to make management scientific and, in doing so, render it truly professional. This is why MI is strengthening its stewardship by introducing our test of authentic, management maturity. Learning works best when organisations have recognised and acknowledged their own immaturity and established their own maturity.
You can take our quick test now and you will find the key areas you need to work on to develop a heightened state of management professionalism and maturity. Every ‘No’ answer equates to a greater likelihood of unscientific, unprofessional practice.
Q 1. Do you readily acknowledge that “…there can only be one science of management behaviour.”
Q 2. Are all your management decisions based on the scientific method of evidence collection, causation, diagnosis, treatment and evaluation?
Q 3. Is your own management behaviour based on a recognised, and externally validated, evidence-based standard?
Q 4. Do you operate within a wider, well-defined, mature, organisational management system (a system with a purpose to create as much Total Stakeholder Value as possible)?
Q 5. Does everyone in your organization work to the same, defined system while continuously improving its value?
Q 6. Do you have a clear definition of what value means; and a method for measuring everyone’s contribution to it?
Q 7. Do you have a clear definition of, and standard for, what constitutes valid evidence?
Q 8. Have you ever read, been educated in, or trained to use any of the MI defined terms of ‘mature management’?
Q 9. Do you follow a management philosophy with a moral and ethical code to be scientific in serving all stakeholders as well as you possibly can?
See also “It’s time to end the snake oil and quackery by professionalising ‘organizational health”
‘The Maturity Institute’s Professional, Scientific, Test of Management Quality’ and ‘Quack Manager Test’ Copyright Maturity Institute, 2021
[i] ‘The movement toward the professionalization of medicine.’ Article in BMJ Clinical Research · November 1990 DOI: 10.1136/bmj.301.6754.688 · https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2224238/,
[ii] Quoted by Aubrey C. Daniels in “Bringing out the best in people” (McGraw Hill, 2000); attributed to Ed Anderson, Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies board of trustees. Full quotation is “Being a chemist by profession, I often wondered why there is only one chemistry, one biology, one physics and there are 10,000 psychologies. Of course there can be only one science of behavior”.
[iii] The Mature Corporation – A Model of Responsible Capitalism (2019)
[iv] See Evidence-Based Management, by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton, reported in HBR (January 2006) https://hbr.org/2006/01/evidence-based-management
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