There was a programme in the "In Business" series on Radio 4 recently that disturbed some very important ghosts.

There was a programme in the "In Business" series on Radio 4 recently that disturbed some very important ghosts.

The programme, through the words of the Gurus of the last century, confirmed the basis of our disquiet with the conventional “Command and Control” model of management.

All of the guests on the programme talked about releasing the ingenuity and creativity of the workforce through autonomy.

As Peter Drucker said in a recorded interview, "Everybody says that People are our most important asset", then they go ahead and sack them anyway.”

Peter said that he had been preaching the same message for the last 50 or 60 years, that "Human beings are the resource and not the cost", but that in all that time, all of his preaching has had almost no impact.

A reason for this could be that the managers who understood the value of Peter’s words had no idea what to do with those words to make a practical difference to the effectiveness of their workforce.

Employed Managers find their way to a position of management through a number of routes. Historically the most popular was that the employee with the most experience was elevated to the position of supervisor or manager where they are then expected to perform in a completely different role, the preparation for which may only have been to observe their predecessor’s performance and try to copy it.

The more popular route these days is the academically prepared manager who receives a management education and is employed to manage on the basis of that education.

This latter route prepares the manager well to understand business, economics and law, but seldom does the education program contain a module that allows the student to understand how to treat the workforce to allow them to perform to their potential.

The manager who is promoted from the shopfloor is assumed to be in touch with the workforce and therefore a much better “instinctive” manager.
He may remember everything that management used to do to annoy him and cause him to under perform as a member of the workforce but he is faced with intolerable pressure to conform to the behaviour of the management group he has been invited to join.
Management know best and the price of membership of that group is to conform.

The Soft Skills that allow the workforce to work to their full potential, to become as good as they can be, have never been a part of the syllabus that we use to train managers.

Managers are trained to manage process.

Why should we be surprised when they fail to manage people?



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Peter A Hunter is the author of
Breaking the Mould.