There are many known good practices that most companies don't follow simply because they aren't aware of them. The idea is to start a "management hospital", an organization within a company that will research best practices, put them into implementable frameworks, and implement them within organizations. It will treat every bad practice as an organizational illness and try to cure each illness with management doctors.
Most organizations have numerous management flaws. There are several reasons:
1. It's impossible for one person to know of and consider all of the management best practices.
2. MBAs forget 80% of what they've learned and don't know how to put half of what they've learned into practice. This makes their knowledge close to obsolete.
3. Non-MBAs don't have enough experience or knowledge to consider all the best practices.
4. Many leaders have huge egos and low levels of self-awareness. As a result, they focus their efforts on what they think is important. They forget best practices or downgrade their importance.
5. Many more reasons.
These management flaws are diseases that need to be treated in the Management Hospital.
Start a new department in the company called The Management Hospital (or Organizational Hospital). This department will act as a hospital for all the diseases, or bad organizational or management practices.
Here's how it can work:
1. Start a completely independent organization.
2. Research best management practices.
3. Create a diagnostic framework, allowing to diagnose whether or not bad practices occur anywhere in the organization. It can be done by searching for known bad practices or by searching for good practices and verifying they are implemented correctly.
4. Heal diseases! Fix any problems found.
This effort should increase the effectiveness of the organization as well as its level of competitiveness.
Start a new department consisting of independent management consultants, preferably with PhDs in business related subjects. Have them collect bad and good practices and build a framework consisting of diseases and ways to treat them. Then start exploring and looking for these diseases.
Don't forget to get your CEO's buy-in.
matt, I agree on your identified problem. and your solution approach makes sense to me. my question is: do you have ideas about this diagnostic framework? what aspects and components are covered? how to measure and evaluate? any thoughts of templates and questionaires, already? regards frank
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Hi Frank,
Thanks for the comment. No, I don't yet have the framework in place. In fact, it will take a lot of research to do it and it will be a living framework. For now this is just an idea...
Matt
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Matt - nice idea.
One of my clients has been toying with a similar idea. This company has employee engagement as a strategic imperative and they benchmark engagement at a team level to external norms (industry level, country level). They are looking at setting up a "hospital" which researches their top 10% of their managers (in terms of employee engagement scores) and establishes best practices. And use the "hospital" as an education center for the bottom 25% of the managers (in terms of employee engagement scores).
Of course, they don't intend to call it a hospital :) Instead they plan to choose a shiny corporate-sounding name for the center.
Abhishek
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