Barrier:
Authority for Rewards and Budget Usage, and Accountability have gotten Dispersed from Point of Work
The following 3 elements of modern business organizations are strangulating employees and organization while causing employee disengagement:
1. Matrix organization design
2. Disempowered Reporting Manager
3. Process Orientation and No Real Accountability
The following 3 elements of modern business organizations are strangulating employees and organizations while causing employee disengagement:
1. Matrix organization design - several people have the chance to affect the rewards and growth of the employee, often with a different agenda, and the employee is left to navigate between these interests more than simply turning in good work.
2. Disempowered Reporting Manager - each employee has a reporting manager who has to file extensive justification for any reward to be given to a good performing employee. The Manager has to collect feedbacks from several people that have a totally different agenda and fit it into the Performance Measurement Model the company has rolled out Top-Down. On top of it, s/he has only the power to propose a reward, and the next two levels above him/her decide who gets what reward.
3. Process Orientation and No Real Accountability - the Manager is responsible for simply showing that s/he ran the process rolled out from above, towards performance "measurement" and rewards proposal. As long as s/he can show that, there is no real Accountability of how motivated the people below him are and how just they think the system is. Although 3. is in synch with 1 & 2, it's not with the aim of having a vibrant organization.
1 thru 3 above is a disaster, wherein under the umbrellas of Process Orientation, "Employee Care" by several "coordinators" (more often the coordinatee has to coordinate between the "coordinators"!) and "facilitators", and the desire for "Objectivity", hides deep inefficiency and syncophanic-political-nepotistic reward, and hierarchy-rationalization setup.
"Grade A people try to bring up Grade A people, while Grade B people stick for Grade C people"...at some point, the hierarchy can get too poisoned, even as the organization's products and services were getting well established in the market. So the scenario can linger for many years, the politics treated as normal, and ability to navigate the waters touted as the 'REAL' leadership quality!
1 thru 3 above is a disaster wherein under the umbrella of Process Orientation, "Employee Care" by several "coordinators" (more often the coordinatee has to coordinate between the "coordinators"!) and "facilitators", and the desire to appear "Objective", hides deep inefficiency and a syncophanic-political-nepotistic reward and excessive hierarchy-rationalization setup. To save organizations, this needs to give way to:
A Direct, Single Manager for each worker employee with:
Direct Rewards Authority and Budget
Direct Accountability for Employee Output and Motivation
There are too many redundent, indeed bottleneck, managerial layers - horizontal and vertical, the costs of these need to be saved and partly passed on to the ones that deliver the work and those that directly manage them, with the infusion of Accountability and Authority at the point of actual Work.
Why do we need so many level of management and hierarchy at all? Those command and control structures were designed for the industrial era. New technologies make better organizational designs possible.
We tried to come up with an org design that is more reflective of real social interactions in our just-in-time teams hack: http://www.managementexchange.com/hack/just-time-teams The idea is to flatten the organization, decentralize power, and reframe what it means to advance. It would be interesting to hear your thoughts on how our hack might address this barrier you've identified.
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