Here is my personal response to the four issues that have been raised by Gary Hamel. In case, if you don't know what issues I am talking about, please refer to my last blog to know the management issues at hand.
According to me, the deep-seated impediments and their corresponding solutions are:
1) Businesses are, to a large extent, hypocritical about the growth of their employees. They are, by and large, focused on only about earning short-term numbers and meeting short-term deadlines, even if it means, at times, at the expense of the long-term growth of their businesses and their employees. In short, people management is poor at most of the organizations across the world. The solution lies in partnering closely with the academics and with educational institutions for the continual growth of the employees - especially for the senior management people, who generally belong to the old school of thought, and are reluctant to get out of their comfort zones in order to “hog” on the new ideas and to embrace even positive radical changes, if need be.
2) Senior management doesn’t show much confidence in its sub-ordinates. It is not much heedful of ideas generated by the sub-ordinates. Most of the times, senior management takes its sub-ordinates for granted, thinking that they are novice who have not much idea about the business.
3) Senior management doesn’t take time out to educate its people about the business in which they are. Until and unless, people fully understand their businesses, they just can’t innovate. They need to be tuned to think the way they should be in order to be innovative and to be productive at their businesses. And, who else can teach the employees better than the senior management itself?
4) Usually, senior management is out of sync with the world’s demands for talents to do businesses. The today’s world needs Specialist Generalists. Things are getting extremely cross-functional. And, it is just not possible to hit the “obscene” amount of growth by being a specialist of just one thing. People need to think cross-functionally to achieve a big deal out-of-the-box. So, to get in sync with the reality, senior management has to realize this big time. And, to breed Specialist Generalists, it has to keep moving its employees across functions and domains. This might involve sending some of the bright prospects to school, once again, or might involve “bringing” school to the organization, or might even involve creating school at the organization itself. Whichever may be the feasible way, but one of them has to be embraced gracefully.
5) Management has to prove to its employees that their innovative ideas, if implemented, will be rewarded proportionally. And, the reward MUST be high enough to make the juice worth the squeeze.
6) Even not-currently-possible-to-implement ideas should not be shrugged off right away. All those ideas need to be maintained properly so that, if in the future the situations change – which will be, undoubtedly - to become more favorable to the business, they can be picked up for cutting the mustard, anytime.
7) Performance appraisal systems need a big time overhauling. The onus of appraisals should not lie only in a few hands, which could become “dirty” in this greedy world, anytime. Organizations have to shield themselves from this type of catastrophe, because loss of great, honest people can never be compensated, and the damage caused by “dirty” hands can never be completely undone – no matter how hard you try, the world will just not let you forget about the damage. So, what I think the solution to this problem is that we need to make appraisal systems completely transparent and cyclic by 360 degrees. When I say transparent, it means all the people in the organization know about the progress made by the other people in the organization, so that when the bounty is distributed, nobody has any grudges, or gets surprises. This transparent system shields innocent, honest performers from “dirty” hands, if there are any in the organization. Moreover, this type of appraisal system fosters positive competitiveness in the employees. And, who doesn’t want recognition and a pat on her back for all her good work?
8) In the coming days, management doesn’t need to typically manage its employees. The employees are already self-motivated and highly ambitious. Management should trust its recruitment process for a change. If it cannot trust its recruitment process, it should revamp the recruitment process to make it bankable. The main focus of management should be on facilitating the work as smoothly as possible, so that the productivity of the entire organization shoots up. Management should always try to keep enough on its employees’ plates, so that everybody is always charged up with some meaningful work. Over all, the role of management is not going to be of a supervisor, but of a facilitator.
9) The whole essence of management can be summarized in a few adjectives. Organizations just need to be heedful of these adjectives: honest, fair, upfront, respectful, loyal, transparent, caring, supporting, egalitarian, ethical, and innovative. Once these adjectives are very well taken care of, the company’s till will always be ringing loud enough to be heard by the whole world.
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