Empower Your Supervisors

In traditional organisations top managers are employed to ensure that
organisations are competitive and that lower level managers and staff
have job security. In these traditional organisations it is further
expected that staff remain loyal and implement the strategy that
management created with loyalty and obedience.

The contemporary organisation reverses this pyramid and makes
empowered lower-level managers and employees responsible for
organisational competitiveness and their own development. In these
organisations the role of management is to support personnel to develop
and to manage by removing obstacles and integrating capabilities.

The case of New United Motor Manufacturing Inc (NUMMI) plant in
Fremont, California is often quoted to illustrate this concept. This
programme was a joint venture between Toyota and General Motors (GM). GM
closed the plant in 1982 in part because it was considered to have the
worst workforce in America. There were wide-scale social and economic
issues with staff, people did not show up for work and there was subtle
sabotage of the cars. There were apparently some people that thought it
funny to put coke bottles into the door assemblies during the
manufacturing process, which would rattle once the car was in the hands
of customers.

Toyota re-opened the plant in 1984. GM told them that the workers
were awful but that the managers were great and recommended that they
re-hire them. In stead they did not rehire the managers but hired most
of the original workforce. A significant portion of these employees
learnt new techniques that allowed them to follow the same precision
methods used by Toyota in Japan at that time. The NUMMI plant improved
and became on of the highest quality production units in the whole of
GM’s line-up. The moral is that they achieved this with the same people
– just a different system of organising management.

There are different types of managers in organisations.

Levels of management

• Executive management are often called top management, executives
  or senior managers are responsible for developing the organization’s
  strategy and work on behalf of shareholders and the directors in
  achieving the financial bottom line and other strategic objectives. They
  are the stewards for the organisational vision and mission and would
  typically have some functional, general and direct staff reporting to
  them.

• Functional managers are often called staff managers and are
  responsible for the efficiency and effectiveness of an area, such as
  accounting or marketing.

• A general manager tends to be a manager of managers or is often
  times a manager of supervisors.

• Supervisory or team managers are responsible for coordinating a
  subgroup of a particular function or a team composed of members from the
  same or different parts of the organization.

Managers are also classified by their functional role as staff
managers, line managers and project managers as follows:

• A staff manager leads a unit that produces indirect
  input.

• A line manager leads a function that contributes directly to the
  products or services the organization creates.

• A project manager has the responsibility for the planning,
  execution, and closing of projects.

Flatter management

The number of managers and “managers of managers” used to be
determined by simple ratios. It is assumed that the average person can
manager about 7-10 people so that in a military type hierarchy we
appointed 1 supervisor for 10 people and for every 3 or more supervisor,
we appointed one line manager. For every 3 or so line managers, there is
a functional or general manager or an executive manager. This way the
whole organisation fit into a command and control structure. The task of
management was to plan, lead, organise and control and to report on this
to the next level. In many ways this structure of management has failed.
Using highly paid resources for reporting is waste of human capital.
Planning is seldom effective. Leadership seems mystical and very
ineffective in most organisations. Organising systems are often flawed
due to bad planning. Control structures in most organisations have
effectively been replaced by systems. So it seems that there is very
little use for management.

There are many organisations that have realised this and there is
wide-scale flattening of organisations and forcing a narrowing between
management and delivery. Recent cases in large organisations have seen
the removal of whole layers of management and re-organising the way work
is done.

Research shows that teams that there is an organisation effect that
occurs when team grow larger than 8 people as coordination starts taking
more time than it contributes to results. Research also shows that for a
team to be effective, that the team leader needs to be inside the team
and have the skills to manage the team. One manager or executive can
effectively coordinate 4-8 teams if they have the right skills and
through ideas such as use of technology and automation, six sigma, lean,
scrum and other modern management techniques a whole more can be
achieved by small teams. This challenges the notion of large
organisational structures and looks more at using small teams and
cross-functional structures to achieve quick delivery of usable products
and projects.

In many ways we are surprised when our organisations do not perform
and when management sits down to analyse it – they often conclude that
staff must the problem. They often appoint new managers to get
higher-level people to manage the complexities of staff. The paradox is
that management seldom looks at how it manages and very little is done
to improve the management process. Smaller organisations also do not
often have the capacity, or do not take the time to evaluate how
effective management has been at what they need to do to improve the
management process.

A challenge in evaluating the efficacy of management is that managers
manage in a way that they think people work. All managers have the
notion that employees need to work harder and stay longer hours, while
often there is simply poor planning of execution and failure to engage
with the key issues in a business. It can be argued that the basics of
critical thinking and a lack of decision making is often the major
determinant of business success and that managers that understand how to
connect the dots, get much better results than those that do not. Gone
must be the days where managers are air traffic controllers, reminder
services, politicians fighting for resources and just there to forward
mails between departments.

This brings us to the question to see what we need to do differently
to enable managers to manage effectively and employees to perform.

A lot of management is about critically reflecting and ensuring that
the soft skills in managing the team. A quick daily checklist for a
manager is

• What do you do to challenge the team to improve results
  daily?

• How effectively do you interpret the team requirements?

• Are you an effective decision maker?

• Can you align the team tasks with organisational
  objectives?

• Do you create team learning?

• Can you anticipate what will be required from the team?

• What can I do to improve the work organisation system of the
  team?

The whole science of teaming and team-based organisations is evolving
rapidly and once you start looking there are lots of resources to help
you to start re-organising the way that your organisation achieves its
results.