April 4

Fire Your Managers?

How to have effective managementIf you are a business owner then you know what it means to always be looking for the next big thing in your business.  The next big idea.  The next new strategy.  The minute something starts working for someone, there’s a tendency to want to jump on that bandwagon and get excited about it.   One of my readers recently sent me an article that I had also run across in Linkedin about flattening your organization so that it is less hierarchical.

The article states that firing managers is a path to company growth.  That’s certainly a compelling concept and it’s worth exploring but it’s certainly not for every, or even most businesses.

I like to lay nice so here are three things that I agree that should be done in a thriving business.

What I liked:

  1. Create a team culture: Teamwork just never goes out of style.  Always do this.
  2. Set Goals:  Setting goals in an organization and aligning your people with those goals?  Yes please!
  3. Provide Support:  Don’t be a Lumberg.  Support your people if there is an issue.  Good managers buy in to the team mentality which means that they help other people be right not wrong.

What I didn’t like:

  1. People Are Still People:  Did people all of the sudden become flawless and I didn’t take my pill?  Get out of your damn utopian, unicorn land and think for a second.  I work with business owners who are at the top echelon of holding themselves accountable and you know who they hire?  Me.  A coach.  Why?  Even the best need accountability and an outside perspective.
  2. Beware of Fads:  A few years ago Best Buy created a process called ROWE.  It was about managing results and not the presence of an employee.  The result?  Best Buy fired their CEO last May and they got rid of ROWE.  The struggle continues.  Fads always sound great like when people use to have pet rocks.  Remember that?  People actually bought rocks as pets.  Right now someone is petting their pet rock and listening to Vanilla Ice.  Beware of the fad.
  3. One Size Fits One:  The self-help industry made a fortune on the concept that what works for one will work for all.  It’s called the out-of-the-box done for you system that actually worked for one guy for whatever reason.  Ever bought one?  Then you know what I am taking about.  I do believe that a flattened hierarchy would work for some businesses but they are the exception not the rule.

Beware of the management “pet rock”.  I have worked with and for several companies who have tried to implement this concept of a flattened hierarchy and they never last.  Like it or not hierarchies work and are essential for large companies and even smaller companies who try and fight this end up giving in eventually.

If you are worried about the effectiveness of your managers and how they are performing, the first place I would look is at the training that they receive.  Is it the manager that is failing or is the company failing the manager?  Now back to my pet rock collection.

More on that topic coming soon…..

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