Management - The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

http://blogs.theage.com.au/managementline/archives/2006/04/management_the.html

 

COA COMMENT: The management practices recommended below are a unique and innovative way to manage an organisation. It clearly has advantages and disadvantages. The advantages are that an employee could complain about creeping, crawling incompetent ‘would be manager’ sycophants who are more interested in their promotion than making a good public service. The disadvantages are that creeping, crawling incompetent sycophants could shaft good and effective managers just so that they could get a promotion.

Probably a better idea is for good top managers to regularly listen more carefully to their staff in general.

Regular, independent and confidential staff surveys as to the effectiveness of managers and supervisors and organisational problems as well as the good things about an agency would produce better and fairer results than any other process. This would eventually instil a regime of confidence of staff in senior managers, supervisors and fellow workers.

 

The Article 

Great managers are important. So are the dumb ones (unless you're working for one) because we can learn a lot from best and worst practice. First, check out Fortune Senior Editor David Kirkpatrick's report on Indian global IT services outfit HCL Technologies . Get a load of this. HCL has taken 360 degree performance appraisals - where employees rate their boss and other managers - to a new level. What's different at HCL is that all results are posted online for all to see!! Not only that, HCL employees can create an electronic "ticket" flagging a problem they think needs to be solved. Better still, the "tickets" can only be closed by the employees. And you can't become a manager there until you have passed courses that teach you negotiation and presentation skills, account management and dealing with expectations of employees and customers.

According to this report, HCL would come across as the kind of company that puts its employees ahead, or at the very least on the same level, as its customers. Which is smart, given the skills shortages and high rates of attrition in that industry.
A completely different story is presented by Stanford professors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton. Their latest book Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense is shaping up as the management book of the year.

In this piece from the Harvard Business School Working Knowledge series, they skewer the Three Myths of Management.

Like benchmarking. There's nothing wrong with learning from the experience of other companies. The problem is it usually results in mindless imitation with no attempt to actually look at what the benchmarking target does that makes it so successful. You would have to say that focusing just on successful companies is also problematic. Looking at how the failures screwed up is just as instructive. The other two myths: just sticking to what seems to have worked in the past, and blindly following deeply held yet unexamined ideologies. Like performance-based pay.