The topics that address motivating people include:
•
Effective philosophy of management
•
Maslow’s theory
•
Theories X,Y, L & Z
•
Knowledge workers
•
Listening for understanding
•
Effective organizational policies
•
Teamwork
•
Fear on the job
Lecture 5 is
brief and only covers the first bullet because the associated exercise takes
some time and is critical to your eventual success in improving your
organization’s effectiveness.
Requirements
for an Effective Philosophy of Management
An Effective Philosophy of
management should, according to Management
in Action by William Hitt, p.13:
–
Be the foundation stone for the organization
–
Include a clear statement of values, goals
and strategies
–
Be internally consistent
–
Demonstrate an awareness of a larger environment
–
Be operational (This means it can be interpreted
and put into practice easily.)
–
Be internalized by all members of the management
team
–
Be communicated to all employees
–
Be self-renewing
You can easily test the effectiveness
of your organization’s management philosophy. Ask yourself do you know what the
philosophy is without looking it up? Do all of your staff members know the
philosophy well enough to know how the organization ranks the following seven
parameters in relative importance:
1.
cost,
2.
schedule,
3.
quality,
4.
safety,
5.
customer satisfaction,
6.
environmental issues and
7.
involvement in and support of community
activities?
If not then your organization’s
management philosophy isn’t effective or isn’t being communicated effectively.
At this point we aren’t addressing what constitutes a good or bad philosophy.
The point is that even a good philosophy isn’t effective if it isn’t understood
and practiced by all employees. As a manager it’s your job to make sure your organization’s
management philosophy is communicated, understood and practiced in your
organization.
Often serious problems are caused
by individuals acting outside the organization’s philosophy of management with
the intent of helping the organization. That is one reason it is essential to
make sure every employee working for you understands your organization’s
management philosophy and knows that the organization does not want to be
“helped” by actions inconsistent with the philosophy. It is cheaper to pay for avoiding
problems up front than to try to cover up or fix problems that are not ethical
or consistent with the management philosophy. All employees will not act consistently
with the organization’s philosophy unless it is made crystal clear.
One example of such unwanted “help” is time
charges. Some employees think they are helping the organization by shading
their time charges toward direct charges to some project or client rather than
accurately recording indirect time. This results in management not knowing the
true indirect costs and inhibits them from finding and fixing problems that are
causing unnecessarily high indirect charges. Employees must be trained that
management wants accurate time charges, not only because this is a legal and
ethical requirement but because management cannot do its job if it gets
inaccurate data.
Exercise
1.
Review your organization’s documentation on
management philosophy and determine how the seven items listed above are ranked
in importance by this documentation.
2.
Reflect on how you and other managers behave in
interacting with subordinates. Are your actions consistent with the stated
philosophy of management? For example, if the documentation says customer
satisfaction is number one do managers always place customer satisfaction ahead
of cost, schedule and quality?
3.
Ask three or four of your direct reports or
peers to write down the rank order of importance of the first five items on the
list and compare the results. Do all of the lists match? Are the lists in
agreement with the documented philosophy of management?
The results of this exercise tell
you how much work you have to do to build the basic foundation of an effective
organization. If your behavior matches the documentation and if your
subordinate’s lists are consistent and also match the documented philosophy
then your organization has communicated its management philosophy effectively.
If not then you and other managers have work to do. You cannot be an effective
leader nor have an effective organization without an effective philosophy of
management as defined above.
A goal of this course is to help
students develop their leadership capabilities and ultimately their
organization’s capabilities to the point that the workers can be empowered to
control their own processes without micromanagement. This cannot be achieved if
the workers have not internalized the organization’s philosophy of management.
Think for a minute what would happen if an organization empowered workers that
each has a different opinion of what is most important to the organization.
Conflict and chaos would result. If you
find that your management philosophy is not effective then the first step in
your leadership action plan must be to correct this deficiency. There is no
need to document this step in your leadership action plan; just do it.
For the purposes of this course I
assume there is a documented philosophy of management for the student’s
organization. Further, I assume that students are at a level in their
organization that changing the documented philosophy is not within their
control. Therefore the primary task for students that finds their
organization’s philosophy of management fails the effectiveness test in the
exercise above is to ensure that everyone in their organization knows and understands
the documented philosophy. The best way to accomplish this is to hold several
group meetings to discuss the philosophy. It is not sufficient to distribute
copies and ask people to read and follow the philosophy. People will have
questions on why the philosophy is what it is and they will interpret it
differently. Holding group discussions can bring people to a common
understanding and a better appreciation of why they need to be aware and follow
the documented philosophy. If the student has the authority and available
budget then holding off site meetings is well worth the extra effort and cost
for discussion of philosophy of management. People are better able to think
objectively about topics like management philosophy when separated from the
concerns of immediate work.
If you find that the pace of blog posts
isn’t compatible with the pace you would
like to maintain in studying this material you can buy the book “The Manager’s Guide for Effective
Leadership” at:
or hard copy or for nook at:
or hard copy or E-book at:
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