Management Structure through Evolution - Employee Roles Challenged

A productive employee is the answer to the success of any business. Throughout my book Employee and the Employer, you will find multiple references about management weaknesses, but the ultimate objective of my articles are to show business, how we can perform better and turn around the economy through fair judgments and collective performances.

Every employee requires to strive be a leader in their own respective profession, that way the organization will benefit from the individual expertise to contribute to the collective goal. Job of management would be to manage and motivate these individual leaders in the most fair method to help achieve the corporate goals.

There are times, and in many companies, mostly big corporations with a structure based on hierarchy and no open door policy, explicit leadership in respective expertise can cause demotivating reaction from immediate supervisor. Let me explain why:

An management structure with no open door policy creates confidential surroundings around management. This way, acknowledgement of employee performance is at the mercy of individual supervisor/ manager of that employee. This type of organizations has a tendency of hiring personnel more based of personal references and preexisting relationships than hiring in competitive edge based on qualifications. Hence, the fact becomes that the managers/ supervisors are well known and faithful to each other, whereas the general employees becomes a completely separate community and treated partially and sometimes down trodden. Majority of these management structure, you will find consists of members with poor qualifications, expertise and in most common, lack of qualitative leadership skills. Often times, in these organizations you will find that some front line employees and much higher qualified with promising results that their own supervisors and this creates substantial risk for the employee to be blanketed from any future promotions that could potentially cause challenge to the said supervisor.

In this kind of structure the front and the middle level managers control the future of all employees and chose their favorites to be revealed to any activities that could draw attention of top management. Mind you, that the top management are usually the ones who at most times cannot compromise with quality of employees as they are held responsible by board for abiding laws, principles and most importantly performance of the business. But the fact remains that the gap between the frontline employees who I most often refer to a true warriors and the top management remains large.

This type of structure is not officially recognized and they are not a good example for any business either. I would say that the management structures can be primarily differentiated into two thematic categories:

• Industry standard structures that are well documented by business laureates.
• And the structures that are evolved into a shape by certain managers with poor characteristics.

It's the second type I am referring to and becoming more and more common in Canada, mostly in medium to large Canadian corporations. Alarming huh! Though this approach is utterly harmful for the business but it has its own benefits. Interestingly, managers with poor qualifications tend to survive more in this environment, in other words, they create this environment to save them from getting terminated for poor performance. Performance report in corporations are highly manageable. By which I mean that if there are no appropriate auditing in place from top management, the performance report can be superficially presented in many different positive manners hiding the weakness underneath. Management then tries more to blanket the reporting outcome than actually focusing on the true performance and create a better foundation for the future. These type of managers, once inside a company, targets for about 5 years of existence. Usually, once they leave or forced to leave, they leave a broken infrastructure with major broken employee motivation and high attrition rate of the departments targeted for attacks.

Some of you have asked me, then the question is how these managers are able to create such environment under the nose of the top? Good question. Not all the CEO are strong enough to fight the odds. Technically speaking, CEOs who have struggled to achieve their position have superior strength that those who inherited from their forefathers. Founder of a company takes the risk and true achiever of the success. A lot of times, the followers are just maintaining what the forefathers achieved. In that process, CEO requires his fellow superior management to be highly faithful to him and ready commit to a blanket presentation to the board for the CEO to maintain his/ her position and credibility to the shareholders. That being said, there are also example when the followers exceeded the forefathers.

An employee's goal should always be to excel in performance benefiting the business itself rather than their individual managers/ supervisors. Always to remember one thing, two years from now that manager may not be able to maintain confidentiality of his poor work and may be replaced by someone truly qualified.