In our organisations The Manager is normally the person with the least hands-on experience, but he is expected to control the people with the most hands-on experience—the workforce.
Should we be happy to continue using this recipe for disaster as a core management strategy or should we be looking for a more logical strategy, one that includes the experience of the workforce instead of ignoring it.
I recently became involved in a conversation with a researcher who belonged to the Performance Management Group of a leading business school.
Being curious I had to ask exactly how it was that her group actually “Managed” performance.
She told me that the work of her group centred around finding a way to measure the performance of the workforce such that when the workforce strayed from norms or targets laid down by management, management could use the collected data to drag the workforce’s performance back to what they believed it should be.
I was struck by the peculiar nature of the object of their research. The Holy Grail for her group appeared to be the discovery of the numerical tool that would allow “The Manager", the person with the least hands-on experience, to have the ability to control the people with the most hands-on experience, the workforce.
This led me to ask the question: What advantage could we expect if we allowed the most experienced people to be guided by the least experienced people? It sounds like a recipe for disaster. For much of our industry it is.
Since the days when business became a subject that could be taught in schools, students and staff alike have been looking for the strategy that could be taught to allow managers to control the workforce.
The performance management group is the tip of that iceberg. Today’s management strategies are all grounded in the same philosophy and thus are all destined to fail for precisely the same reason, that they ignore the input of the workforce.
Each strategy relies on transmitting the needs of management in a downward direction, towards the workforce, but takes no notice of the workforce’s desire to transmit their needs upwards, towards management. The name of this downward looking management strategy is “Command and Control”. Management commands and through those commands seeks to control the workforce.
The reason that there is an ongoing search to find the right strategy to control the workforce is because every time the "Right" strategy is found and implemented, there is a time lag while the systems are put in place before anyone realises that once again the "Right" strategy has not proved the universal panacea it was thought to be while it was still in the theoretical stage, and the emperor has still not got any clothes.
I am reminded of the wisdom of the prophets who, having failed to bring the mountain to Mahomet, did not sit down with a focus group and conclude that what they really needed was a bigger mountain moving tool.
Their wisdom consisted of the realisation that having failed to bring the mountain to Mahomet the problem was not one of moving mountains but of bringing the mountain and Mahomet together.
In our case, instead of trying to bring the workforce to the managers heel through command and control, the lesson that we could learn is that perhaps it is time to realise that the workforce have got far more experience of doing their jobs than the manager, and therefore know better than the manager how to do them.
When we appreciate this it becomes clear that a more effective management strategy would be to allow the workforce to become involved in their own management, because they are the only people who really know what is required to do their jobs.
Their work then becomes managed by an expert who is not only more knowledgeable than the traditional manager but, because their expertise is being appreciated, they also feel much better about what they do.
