While working on a learning strategy for a global service department in a pharmaceutical company, I had unsuccessfully tried to solicit support from the corporate HR department. One day, my client and I ran into the HR director and his boss, the company CFO, in the canteen. We had lunch together, and the CFO made some comments on our project. The next day, the HR director called me and offered his support to move things forward. I gladly accepted and had already set up meetings with him and some of his direct reports, when a couple of days later, the appointments were cancelled again without a reason. I asked around and heard through the grapevine that the HR director simply had misjudged the CFO’s interest in the topic. As soon as it became clear that the board was not going to allocate additional funding or resources to HR for our project, the HR director’s interest in the topic vanished as quickly as it had appeared.
The self-reference of management not only shows in many managers’ desire to simply add more financial and human resources to their own departments, regardless of the interests of the company as a whole. The lack of internal checks and balances can also seduce top-executives to take advantage of their privileged positions and to commit financial and other kinds of fraud. The so-called Enron scandal, the systematic falsification of the energy company’s balance sheets in 2001, created one of the most complex bankruptcies in US history and led to stronger accounting regulations in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act; however, such high-profile cases are probably only the tip of the iceberg, and many smaller cases of management abuse remain undetected or are secretly corrected, without the public ever knowing about them.
Of course, fraud is not unique to management. I also do not at all want to sug- gest that managers are somehow bad people. Quite the contrary, I know from personal experience that most managers are dedicated and hard-working employees! In fact, managers are as much victims of management as normal employees. Managers are forced to work within hierarchical power structures, and the sandwich position that most middle managers find themselves in, with pressure from above and from below, is probably responsible for many cases of burnout and early retirement.
Chapter 3 | Management Unplugged: Modulating to a Post-Management Key
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It is true, however, and has been empirically shown time and again that management is conducive to fraud and unethical behavior because managers have power that cannot really be controlled effectively. Some authors argue that one must simply accept power and understand how it works in order to be successful.7 Nonetheless, history teaches us that if power is not checked
or controlled from those who are affected by it, it becomes dangerous. As the saying goes: Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Other authors distinguish good management and good managers from bad management and bad managers8 in order to explain the undesired effects of
management. Yet the distinction between good and bad is generic and neither explains nor justifies a dysfunctional paradigm. Not only managerial tasks, but all tasks, everything we do, can be done well or not so well, judging by the quality of the outcome and the process to get there. We need to look beyond symptoms and understand how underlying structures actually produce good or bad surface phenomena. The problems with management are not due to bad managers; rather, they are of a structural nature. The separation of work planning and execution limits and often prevents employees from taking a holistic perspective on their work and from being creative to solve problems. Still other defenders of management argue that the challenges of bureaucracy and lack of employee motivation have already been addressed by management theorists and practitioners. In most companies, managers get trained on how to empower, motivate, and develop their staff. Also, employees may receive only high-level objectives from their managers, and be given the liberty to decide themselves how best to achieve these objectives, as proclaimed by the laissez faire management style that is common in many corporations. I often hear employees praise their manager exactly for not being a manager. “My manager is great, she leaves me alone and lets me do my work without interfering!” But if managers no longer command and control; if the primary function of managers becomes to empower, motivate, and develop their team; if decision-making is delegated down, then why create hierarchical positions in the first place? Why not simply give power directly to the working teams and let them decide how best to collaborate with other teams and achieve company objectives?
Stripped of their power to make decisions, all that remains of management positions is their administrative function. People need to be hired and let go, vacation and sick times need to granted, and the organization needs some- one, a concrete person to be accountable. But this person does not have to be a manager who holds a higher position than other people in the team. Supported by software systems and workflows, administrative management functions for the team can be taken over by any designated employee.
7Jeffrey Pfeffer, Power, 2010
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