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Styles of Management

The Management Pocketbooks Pocket Correspondence Course

Pocketblog has gone back to basics. This is part of an extended management course.


In the ‘good old days’ – good old days for managers, that is – there was one style of management:

Tell them what to do – expect them to do it – punish them if they don’t.

Life must have been easy then for managers: no need to motivate people (more on that in coming weeks), no back chat and alternative ideas from staff, no worry about giving offence, and high levels of compliance.

Scientific Management

On the other hand, how efficient were workers then? Frederick Winslow Taylor wanted to apply the principles of science to management and was the first person to try to analyse an organisation, test his ideas with experiments, and document the results.

‘Taylorism’ treated people as cogs in a machine. Optimise all aspects of the process, including people, to get the best results. So Taylor introduced time and motion studies to optimise how workers did things, and piece rates as incentives for workers. He said ‘do it this way and you will get your reward’. This was scientific management.

Humanistic Management

Scientific Management largely failed. Yes, it led to the hugely successful production line and arguably to just-in-time concepts too. Six Sigma, TQM and Lean can all draw their origins from scientific management too.

But it failed as regards people. Elton Mayo was a follower of Taylor and tried to apply Taylorist principle in the Hawthorne Lighting Plant. He discovered that changing light levels changed work rates. But it didn’t matter how you changed the light levels, as long as you engaged the workers in the process. What mattered was engaging people. It still does – that’s why staff engagement is such a big deal.

Theory X or Theory Y

The tension between task focus and people focus was crystallised by Douglas McGregor in his models of management style called Theory X (task, transaction, process, incentive focused) and Theory Y (people, consensus, motivation, satisfaction focused).

These are reflected in two contrasting styles of day-to-day management: Management by Objectives (MBO) and Management by Walking About (MWA).

MBO is all about setting clear objectives to staff and supporting them in achieving them – it is formal, transactional and has been seen as highly successful. For example, Bill Packard attributed the success of Hewlett Packard in its heyday to MBO.

But strangely, Bill Packard was well known for wandering around all areas of his business, chatting with people, building relationships, sharing ideas and offering inspiration.

Balance

There is no ‘right’ style of management. We each need to find the right balance, that works for us. We also need to adapt that balance to each individual and to changing circumstances.

Balance of Management Styles

Further Reading

You may also like the Pocketblog articleIt’s time to get enabling

Three Six Sigma Articles

  1. Belt up and Reduce Errors
  2. The DMAIC Solution Process
  3. Six Tools from Six Sigma
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Peter Drucker: Management by Objectives

Last week, we looked at the profound influence Peter Drucker had on management.  This week, let’s look at one of his biggest contributions: Management by Objectives (MBO).

Drucker’s biographer asserts that he first heard the term while studying practices at General Motors, during the Second World War.  It certainly seems like a concept that an engineer like GM’s CEO, Alfred Sloane, would have favoured.  Indeed, in more modern times, MBO has been a main stay of corporations like the much-admired Hewlett Packard.  One of its founders, Bill Packard, said of MBO:

‘No operating policy has contributed more to Hewlett-Packard’s success ‘

He went on to describe it as ‘the antithesis of management by control. The latter refers to a tightly controlled system of management of the military type [while] Management by objectives, on the other hand, refers to a system in which overall objectives are clearly stated and agreed upon, and which gives people the flexibility to work toward those goals in ways they determine best for their own areas of responsibility.’

The MBO Cycle

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Management by Objectives is often represented as a cycle with five stages:

  1. Review the organisational context.  This is often seen as the weak point of MBO, as this is sometimes poorly understood.  Drucker, himself, has said: ‘Management by objectives works if you know the objectives: 90% of the time you don’t.’
  2. Reflect the organisation’s objectives in those you set to your team members.  Within the context of the objectives they are set, staff become self-directing, hence Packard’s distinction between MBO and control.
  3. Monitor people’s performance against the objectives you have set, and give regular, effective feedback.  Ideally, provide rapid feedback mechanisms, so that each staff member can assess their performance constantly.
  4. Assess performance against objectives, and then be sure to…
  5. Recognise and reward good performance.

‘What gets Measured, gets Managed’

This is another critique of MBO: if you measure the wrong thing, people will manage their performance to achieve it.  Drucker, as ever, was more subtle than simple descriptions of his ideas suggest and so was ahead of us here.  He noted that employees need four powers to do their jobs well:

  1. the freedom to challenge everything
  2. regular training and development
  3. the ability to achieve the objectives they are set, and see the results
  4. understanding of their organisation’s real purpose
This last means that managers and employees can set objectives that lead to the right behaviours being measured – and hence managed and delivered.

The Practice of Management

In last week’s blog, I laudedThe Practice of Management’.  It was the visionary book that kick-started the management book industry.  In it, Peter Drucker identified seven tasks for the manager of tomorrow (writing in 1954).  They all seem very much of the now, except, perhaps, one, which seems a little… pedestrian: ‘manage by objectives’.

Despite its critiques and detractors, maybe we should listen to the man who also advocated, over 50 years ago, in the same book, that we:

  • devolve risk-taking and decision-making down our organisations
  • prioritise strategic thinking
  • integrate teams of diverse members
  • motivate employees, gain their commitment and participation (‘engage’ them) with quick, clear communication
  • see your organisation as a whole
  • see your organisation and its activities in a wide perspective of society

Not a Management Pocketbook

Peter Drucker, 1909-2005I have found Robert Heller’s book on Peter Drucker to be excellent and recommend it to all Pocketblog readers.

For an introduction to Drucker’s thinking, how about The Essential Drucker, and for daily inspiration, how about The Daily Drucker?

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