I got a Distinction for my first term course Managing People and Organisations. Yay me! as my youngest daughter would say. More importantly I learned a number of different ways to expand my viewpoint.
My tendancy is to use decision shortcuts to achieve things quickly. While this has served me quite well in my career so far, I can also take some time to ponder or consider the second right answer.
Anyhow on to Data Analysis and Statistical Modelling for Business. Yay stats! Actually the KPI lover in me is really looking forward to this. A more immediate benefit is that I don’t have to work things out from scratch. Over this course I’ll get really good at regression testing and other quantitative skills
One response to “MBA 2008 Term 2”
Congratulations for achieving Distinction.
I hope that they taught you the hazards of using a top-down approach to managing people. Its most glaring problem is not being able to take advantage of the inherent creativity, innovation and productivity of existing employees due to use of the top-down command and control model. Even if top executives don’t make such an error, most middle and lower level managers and supervisors do use top-down.
Top-down by its nature demeans and disrespects employees. This model concentrates on ordering around employees with goals, targets, visions and a myriad of other orders. The employee’s needs to be heard, to be able to put in their two cents whenever they want to do so is ignored by top-down managers. In addition, since employees know better than anyone what is going wrong, they are frustrated in not being able to get these problems addressed much less fixed.
So top-down demeans and disrespects employees thus leading them to treat their work, their customers, each other and their bosses with disrespect, even sometimes with hostility. Employees know by their actions that top-down managers don’t care about them so why should they care about the work?
The answer is to stop sending down orders and start listening to employees and providing to them what they say they need to do a better job. The answer is to start providing the highest quality support to employees by asking employees how it can be improved.
I hope that they taught you that it is management’s responsibility to provide to employees the highest quality training, tools, parts, material, discipline, procedures, policies, rules, direction, technical advice and documentation, etc, etc. Top-down management concentrates only on direction and provides very poor quality direction because the best people are self-directed and are not in need of orders, only high quality tools, material, parts and the like so that the employee can do the work to a high standard of quality.
Without being treated with great support, meaning great respect, employees will not commit themselves to their work or to the success of their company. Change that and you will be stunned by the huge amount of inherent creativity, innovation, productivity, motivation and commitment you have unleashed. I have done this several times and was very pleasantly surprised each time.
To learn how I escaped from top-down, read an interview of me at
http://www.extensor.co.uk/articles/int_simonton/interview_ben_simonton.html
Best regards, Ben
Author “Leading People to be Highly Motivated and Committed”