Effective Management

What I think management theorists keep forgetting is that the rubber needs to hit the road. That is, management is a secondary occupation. It exists to make sure something actually gets done well enough, underneath.

Time is the critical component.

There are things you can do right now to alleviate an issue, which some might believe are successful. But if that short-term fix ends up making the overall problems worse later, it was not successful. It just took some time for the lagging consequences to play out.

We, as a species, seem really bad at understanding this. We clamor for fast fixes, then whine later that they were inappropriate. It would make more sense for us to accept that not all consequences are immediate and that we can trace bad things to a much earlier decision. And more importantly, we can learn from this and not keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again. We can get smarter, we can approach getting things done intelligently.

We like hierarchies to run stuff, but we seem to be foggy about their construction. People at different levels get confused about their role in making things happen. You get dictatorial leaders who make outrageous claims, and disabled workers that are entirely disconnected from what they are doing. The circumstances spiral out of control; unfortunate things happen.

At the bottom are the people doing the work.

To scale up an endeavor, they need to be placed in little controlled boxes. They cannot and should not be free to do whatever they choose. They have a job to do, they need to do their job.

But at the same time, if the boxes are so small that they can hardly breathe that is really bad too. They need to have enough freedom that they feel comfortable with what they are doing and can concentrate on doing their best at it. They need to be able to assess the value of what they are doing and participate in deciding if it is a worthwhile activity.

A good workforce will do good works regardless of their management. They will find the better ways to get things done. If they are enabled, the quality of their work will be better. Bad management can steal credit for a good workforce, it happens all of the time.

Good management understands that their job is to make sure the environment exists in order to build up a good workforce. They set the stage, the tone. They can help, but they are not the workforce, they are not in as much control of the situation as they want to believe. They didn’t do something, they set the stage for that thing to get done. It is important, but it is not the main thing.

As you go up the hierarchy, the concerns of management should be time and direction.

The lower managers need to be mostly concerned about tactical issues. They need to make sure the obvious obstacles are not preventing the workforce from accomplishing their effort.

Farther up the hierarchy the concerns should be longer-term. At the very top, the primary concern is strategy. Someone running a company should be obsessed with at least the next five years, if not far longer.

It’s the higher executives that should clue into the negative long-term consequences. They might realize that some tactical decision to get around a problem will hurt them somewhere down the road. They should be the ones who understand enough of the landscape to find a better path forward. They might call for opinions, but they are supposed to be in the position of evaluating all of them correctly. Ultimately direction is their decision, their responsibility.

If a company accidentally cannibalizes its own market with a less effective product, it is a strategic mistake. It may take a long time to play out but it is still a black mark against the leaders at the top. They should not have pointed the company to the edge of a cliff.

If a company lowers quality too far and eats through the value they had built up earlier, that is also a strategic mistake. They should have known exactly what the minimum quality was, and they should be ensuring that the effort does not fall below that bar. They should be able to see that a series of tactical choices doesn’t add up correctly and requires some interference in order to keep it from getting worse. If they don’t act, that is still a decision that they made or should have made. They are still at fault.

If a company blindly trudges forward while the ground beneath them erodes and disappears that is another common strategic mistake. Things were going so well that the upper executives stopped paying attention. They grossly overestimated the lifespan of their offerings. They should have noticed that the landscape changed and they need to change direction now too. They were asleep at the wheel. It is their responsibility to find and follow the road, even as it twists and turns through the forest.

So we put it all together and we can see that we have workers that are comfortable at their jobs. They are doing their best and occasionally raising concerns. Their tactical management jumps in to resolve their blockers quickly. Sometimes someone even higher jumps in later to reset the direction slightly. Overall though the workers are clear about what they have to do, they do it well enough, and they have confidence that they are headed in the same direction as their colleagues. Drama is rare, and while there are always frustrations, they have some confidence that things will get better, albeit it may be slow progress.

Contrast that to an organization out of control. The highest executives are stomping around making outrageous claims. These don’t match what is happening on the ground. People are mostly lost and frustrated. A few are pulling most of the weight and are exhausted. The lower management just exists to beat and whip the troupes. Badness rolls downhill. Conflict is encouraged. There is often a stagnant bureaucracy that exists as nothing but roadblocks. Bad problems don’t ever get fixed, they just fester while people try to steer around them. Navigating the insanity is harder than actually doing the work. Most of what actually gets done is useless; contributes nothing to reaching the goals. Success is rare. Overall whatever value was created in the past is slowly decaying. It’s enough to keep the endeavor funded but poor management is eating away at it instead of contributing to it. The overall direction is downwards and it is obvious to most people involved.

The problem with analysis is often perspective. If you take only a few viewpoints in a large organization, your understanding of the issues will be skewed. You have to step back, look at all of it, in all its ugly details, then objectively address the problems. Realistically, no one will be happy, they will always prefer their own agenda, that their perspective dominates. But what we have trouble understanding is that the best we can do collectively is not the best we can do individually. Management is not optimizing individual careers, it is about making sure that a group of people can get a lot of work done as effectively as the circumstances allow. All that really matters in the end is the long term. Everything else is a distraction.