Today, management is a four-letter word. The common belief is that anything that smacks of management, especially people management, is to be avoided at all costs. Many believe that all managers are bad and all leaders are good.
If the truth is told, management adds tremendous value to organizations and to staff. Without proper management, sustained success is simply not possible. Management’s negative reputation occurred because it lost its way and strayed from its core purpose. The key is for management is to regain its appropriate focus.
How Management Lost Its Way
There are two major management dysfunctions.
Dysfunction #1: An Over Emphasis On Measurement
Management delights in measurement. Since management is concerned with effectiveness and efficiency, measurements are necessary to evaluate progress. When this legitimate need to measure organizational value runs amok, problems occur. While metrics are good and necessary, the danger occurs when an attitude develops that more metrics are better. Soon everything that can be measured is measured. Rather than develop a hierarchy of primary metrics to measure value and secondary metrics for root cause analysis, the number and variety of measurements explodes. Since all these metrics are seen as critical, eventually none are critical.
The result of the overemphasis on measuring everything is metrics and data become fuel to feed the management beast rather than driving a focused effort to assess progress toward high value. When results are not satisfactory (and with that many metrics, some will always be unsatisfactory), then management moves into a control mode to get the ship in order. Eventually monitoring and measuring performance become ends in themselves.
Dysfunction #2: An Over Emphasis on Problem Avoidance
Management abhors deviations. Unlike leaders, who believe trial and error is the route to learning, innovation and improvement, managers value efficiency and zero defects. This attitude is important to an organization’s success. However, like any other strength, it becomes a negative when it is overemphasized.
To ensure that nothing ever goes wrong, managers often over-engineer processes and add multiple steps (hoops?) to avoid any issue. This attitude soon moves from protecting organizational policies and practices from inconsistencies to insuring individual employees’ behavior is consistent, several dilemmas occur:
1. Organizational rules and policies proliferate to the point no one can keep up with all the requirements.
2. The attempt to create consistency means organizational practices become a strait jacket
3. Errors are punished for failure to follow published guidelines.
4. Proper deviations are refused in favor of consistency.
The Result
The combination of management’s overemphasis on metrics and problem avoidance combine to create a very cautious, careful and controlling environment.
Average or expected performance with no risk is desired over high value with some risk.
Instead of focusing on the delivery of high value work to the customer, staff spends excessive time reporting information or trying to figure out how to get actions through the organizational hierarchy.
Success may result but it comes at a cost. It occurs, not because of a great organization, but because of the heroic efforts of individuals.
Too many organizations achieve success only because individual employees perform heroic efforts to compensate for a lack of infrastructure. When this heroic effort occurs, it is despite management, not because of it.
Senior leaders may cheer these accomplishments but unfortunately two significant problems occur.
First, success is a one-off and is not easily repeatable. As a result more variation is created as employees begin to design each piece of work as a separate entity. This also results in more complexity, higher costs and even less success.
Second, highly talented employees burn out and leave the organization. The lack of support, resources and foundational infrastructure take its toll. Talent leaves because they simply become tired from the unnecessary and self-imposed effort required to succeed.
As result employees regularly spend significant time “playing the game” instead of producing the high value work that their jobs were intended to create. When this happens, management has failed.
The True Purpose Of Management
For management to reestablish its value to organizations, it must return to the one important reason it exists. That purpose is to build a platform that makes it easy for employees to succeed in producing high value work toward the organization mission.
There are two significant tasks managers must take to fulfill their primary organizational value.
1. Build Infrastructure So Staff Can Concentrate on High Value Work
The first major purpose of management is to build a foundation and structure necessary for people to experience success. This means management must build aligned infrastructure (processes and systems, rewards and capability development) that provide a solid base for producing and delivering the organization’s services and products. This aligned infrastructure provides staff with the easy access to necessary information and resources as well as contact to other parts of the organization to create and deliver quality services and products to customers.
2. Reduce Complexity (Keep It Simples, Stupid!)
One of the most important tasks of management is to make things simpler, not more complex. Complexity occurs in two ways.
First, management creates complexity by trying to measure everything or by trying to avoid every problem. Extra steps, reports and safeguards are built into organizational practices until all risk is avoided. As a result many employees feel like they must try to achieve success while swimming in molasses.
Second, complexity occurs as a natural part of an organization growing and maturing. Policies and procedures are put in place and services are provided in a myriad of ways to meet customer demand. Additionally, staff functions force-feed activities onto line staff thereby taking away precious time and energy from creating the organizations’ prime value.
As a result of both of these forces, organizations become increasingly bureaucratic, slower, and less responsive to customer needs.
It is interesting that in most organizations employees at every level feel the painful consequences of complexity. Employees talk about not being able to work on their real job or about the amount of time and energy that is wasted getting things done. Executives decry the organization’s inability to change direction or implement highly valued initiatives quickly. While every level of the organization recognizes the symptoms, the root cause (complexity) goes unaddressed. Managers must initiate action that will result in complexity reduction because they are the only ones who can approve changing the way organizations do things. This means that managers must leave their comfort zone of being in total control.
As complexity is identified and addressed, the gain is readily recognized and valued by employees. Staff realizes they are able to spend more time on the parts of the job that matter most. High value work is implemented more quickly. Productivity and morale improve. Complexity reduction provides a visible and tangible way for managers to show they are high value to the organization and to staff by improving (rather than impeding) productivity and motivation.
The Bottom Line
Management is not a dirty word and getting rid of management is not an answer. When management focuses on its function, a critical step toward building a high achieving organization has been taken.
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