The Squawk Point

Organisational Mechanics

  • Home
  • Blog
    • People
    • Data
    • Process
    • Wild Cards
    • Index
  • Podcast
  • Book

The Management Conundrum

16 March, 2020 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

Trust or control?

Imagine a scenario where your employees keep on changing things.  All in the name of improvement and innovation.  Everybody is spending time making your organisation run that little bit better.  It sounds great, a management nirvana,  until you realise that they are tinkering with processes, messing with procedures and running roughshod over policies.

It would be a governance nightmare.

How would you go about controlling it?

Blind trust is a risky strategy. Instead you could:

  • Develop a set of change management procedures
  • Implement a project prioritisation scorecard
  • Enforce the use of a plan on a page, one page summaries, success criteria assessments and cost benefit analyses
  • Employ a change manager
  • Ensure that all decision approvals had to go through 3 organisational layers, a proposer, an approver and an authoriser
  • Commission a Change Steering Committee (a.k.a. SteerCo for the terminally with it)

If you want to stifle innovation and suppress change in your organisation their a plenty of tried and tested ways of going about it.

An alternative

Set some guide rails. 

  • First define the what.  Be explicit about your purpose and where you want to go.  What would good look like?
  • Then work through the how.  What are the values you want your organisation to espouse?  How do you want your employees to behave?

When you are clear about the what and the how let your employees get on with it.  If they are going in the right direction and behaving the right way then they can’t get too much wrong.

Unfortunately all of that would require not a little trust on your part

Trust or control?

Micromanagement is hard work but it might stop you looking bad.

Creating an environment where people can be trusted might even be harder, but could make you look really good

Unfortunately you can’t have both.

So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.

Peter Drucker

If you enjoyed this post click here to receive the next

Read another opinion

Photo by Nadine Shaabana on Unsplash

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: command and control, compliance, Dilbert, human nature, management style, trust

About the Author

James Lawther
James Lawther

James Lawther is a middle-aged, middle manager.

To reach this highly elevated position he has worked in numerous industries, from supermarket retailing to tax collecting.  He has had several operational roles, including running the night shift in a frozen pea packing factory and carrying out operational research for a credit card company.

As you can see from his C.V. he has either a wealth of experience or is incapable of holding down a job.  If the latter is true this post isn’t worth a minute of your attention.

Unfortunately, the only way to find out is to read it and decide for yourself.

www.squawkpoint.com/

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Explore

accountability assumptions beliefs best practice blame bureaucracy capability clarity command and control communication complexity continuous improvement cost saving culture customer focus data is not information decisions employee performance measures empowerment error proofing fessing up gemba human nature incentives information technology innovation key performance indicators learning management style measurement motivation performance management poor service process control purpose reinforcing behaviour service design silo management systems thinking targets teamwork test and learn trust video waste

Receive Posts by e-Mail

Get the next post delivered straight to your inbox

Creative Commons

This information from The Squawk Point is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Creative Commons Licence
Customer Experience Update

Try This:

  • Regression to The Mean

  • Glory Lasts Forever

  • Fish Bone Diagrams – Helpful or Not?

  • Brilliance Alone Won’t Take You Far

Connect

  • E-mail
  • LinkedIn
  • RSS
  • YouTube
  • Cookies
  • Contact Me

Copyright © 2025 · Enterprise Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in