Today’s organizations cannot afford
management; they need leadership! That needed leadership is not exclusive to
those on the top of the organization chart but lies with each and every
employee. Empowerment is a popular buzzword but deployment is typically a
farce. Many managers like to say that they have empowered their reports (the
people who report to them) but the employees know better. When it comes to
decision time, most managers feel compelled to call the shots and leave the
workers resigned to following orders, using their arms and legs, but not their
brains.
Why do we have multiple layers of managers in
our organizations? They:
·
Consume capital
o Salaries
o Bonuses
o Perks
o Offices
o Equipment
·
Distort and delay communications, up and down
·
Delay decisions
o Shielded from
the real work by other managers
o Need for
research to find out what is real
o Justify
existence
A small organization might only need three
levels of employees—CEO/Owner, Process Leaders, and Process Members. The
organization could then be viewed as a long tube similar to a cluster of wires
wrapped in a sheath of support processes. This tube can be accurately labeled
as a value-added conduit. This tube would have raw materials, suppliers, our
firm, distributers, and consumers in series from front to back. The term “our
firm” represents your organization includes what is done internally to change
inputs to outputs in the organization.
The wires inside the tube would be the key
processes of the organization and include process members who do the work and a
process leader. They are responsible for the success of that process and
accountable for making decisions in real time. Process members and process
leaders must therefore be properly selected for their positions, trained, and
given authority to do what is needed and in the best interest of the customers,
employees, and the owners. They should not be second guessed for errors but
helped to correct mistakes and learn. It is okay to make mistakes, we are all
human, as long as they are admitted and corrected quickly. A good rule to
follow is, “Fix the problem and not the blame.”
The distinction between managers and leaders
is important. The word manage has a connotation of control, as if the employees
need to be controlled. Business schools used to teach that the proper “span of
control” for any manager was between three and ten people. A manager under that
thinking could be viewed as sitting in the drivers seat cracking the whip over
the employees. Another type of manager, equally distasteful, is like a
passenger knowing they cannot be a hard driver and ultimately successful,
therefore just sit back and hope the organization is going in the right
direction. A leader is out in front of the employees, leading the way and
setting the direction. Leaders lead!
Much work is going on today to decrease
waste, rework, and redundancy from organizations to cut costs and improve
efficiency. Aren’t too many levels of management a form of waste, rework, and
redundancy?
An organization is optimized when leadership
responsibility is truly distributed to each and every employee and all
employees become leaders.
Resources:
The New Economics, Dr.
W. Edwards
“Organizing for Empowerment”-AES, Suzy Wetlaufer
Ronald Schmidt-Zytec Corporation
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