Barrier:
Cons of a hierarchical organization

By Bharath Ramasubban

June 25, 2010 at 8:08am

Gen Y

Leadership

Strategy. Decision Making

Moonshots

Make direction setting bottom-up and outside-in

De-politicize decision-making

Rethink the philosophical foundations of management

Summary

Why does decision making always have to be judgmental and uncertain? Can we have a better way to leverage employee brain power?

Description

When we think about large, monolithic, matrix organizations, it instills a sense of discomfort for Gen X & Y employees. There is a lot of passion to achieve their notion of success, create a niche for themselves and break a leg or two in the process.

But it seems to be a formidable task when it comes to navigating a large matrix organization because the decision making is so distributed and convoluted that they get lost in translation.

Also, the new generation of workers tend to get bored and demotivated with mundane tasks that are unavoidable in any job function. But the mix of interesting and invigorating work triumphs the mundane work but these days that is seen very less in most jobs and the economy is certainly not helping.

Illustration

When it is a top-down approach in decision making, which is at least 80% of the time in most large organizations if not more, managers tend to take direction or orders than challenge the decision makers. This transcends to a culture of authoritarian workmanship rather than free style thinking and vetting of ideas that is simply against the thinking of Gen Y workers.

An employee's passion (typically) goes out of the window when they are not heard and that happens repeatedly. It is given, in this case, that communication is not a barrier which might sometimes lead to that problem. The people who work on the ground day-in and day-out, sometimes have a better grasp of reality and that is not realized and leveraged by the top decision makers.

Decision making becomes less trivial and more uncertainty associated to it.

Root Causes

Organizations, and people within them, are getting more conservative in taking bold risks and challenging status quo. Leaders and decision makers very rarely put the company ahead of themselves due to lower tolerance towards failures in this economic condition.

When risk taking is looked down, there is less motivation to excel in the lower rungs of the company and hence less chances of being innovative and out-of-box.

Solution

The more authority and accountability is delegated to the lower layers, the better the data that boils up to the leadership for successful decision making. It will simply help reducing uncertainty in

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July 7, 2010 at 5:54am

Bernadine Prygrosky

The writer needs to understand and accept that EVERY job has elements of the routine and mundane - even astronauts have checklists to review! The way to be heard and to influence the decision-makers is first to do your assigned tasks in an outstanding manner. When meetings are held and questions are asked, speak up! Speak up and express yourself, remembering that while being direct one also is better heard if you remain respectful. Make your presence and your views known and soon you will be sought out.

May 10, 2012 at 11:02am

Ben Biddle

I totally agree. Let's just get rid of the management layers altogether. Technology has lowered the costs of coordination, and new, better forms of organization are possible.

While I acknowledge there will always be something mundane to every job, I think more can be done to tap into people's talents and passions to the benefit of the enterprise. There is a lot of productivity lost from under-engaged employees and time-sucking administrative tasks.

One potential solution - or part of the solution - is proposed in our just-in-time teams hack. http://www.managementexchange.com/hack/just-time-teams Check it out and let us know what you think!