I’ve never been much of a fan of Senge and his book the
Fifth Discipline largely because he didn’t attribute much of his work to some
important non-Americans such as Russell Ackoff, and Fred Emery, among others.
However, he simplified the notion that people are largely habitual in the way
they think with his idea of ‘mental models’. It does seem the case that humans
get a way of behaving in their head and then have a lot of trouble changing it,
even if what they are doing is not working for them. Sometimes people don’t
even see that they are the cause of the problem: the trees are definitely in
the way of seeing the forest.
It’s pretty amazing that many CEOs, senior executives and
managers all the way down the food chain don’t understand some fundamental
things they need to do to improve employee engagement. This, despite the
overwhelming evidence that low engagement results in low productivity, poorer
quality output and, where it is an issue, poor safety behaviour. For those more
familiar with the term employee engagement is similar to job satisfaction and
both share similar factors in the various measurement tools used to evaluate
them.
I’ve come across a few organisations in the past few months
where ‘management’ consistently fail to engage their direct reports, their
‘team’, in the basic activities of: sharing purpose and making sure everyone is
singing from the same song sheet; shared strategic planning; shared review of
operations and achievement of the plan; participative decision-making; continuous
improvement; and problem solving. All of these are, along with the meeting of a
bunch of fundamental human needs, are known to increase employee engagement
and, its sequelae.
It seems that this failure of the basics of management
occurs for a number of reasons. The first is lack of knowledge: the manager
simply does not know anything about management and doesn’t know what to do.
This is the classic unconscious incompetence. The manager manages simply
bumbles along using a mental model they got from somewhere, usually watching
someone else who managed them. There has been no effort to learn anything about
management. The second is owning a mental model that was obtained from an
airport book shelf and that is now used for every situation. Mostly the model
is incomplete and the recipe is untested and tried. But, the manager persists,
believing that they have the right formula for success. This might be command
and control or micro-management, for example. The opposite turns out to be
true. In effect the mental model is poor. Next we have the person who just
happens to believe that humans are rather pathetic and that leaders are born
and not made. They have a divine right to lead and to be lord of their domain,
all powerful. This is one of a number of personality flaws that often dominate
the thinking of some managers and drive their behaviour. Then there is the
psychopath in its various forms, where the motive is personal gain, the
exaggeration of self, self-aggrandisement, power, and the manipulation of the
pawns on their personal chessboard.
In all cases, the science of human behaviour and what little
management science there is ignored or, at best, simply not accessed due to
ignorance. What is more interesting is that these problems can be pointed out
when there is a crisis relating to performance, staff turnover, or an employee
discontent but there is no effort to change. More often than not the manager or
CEO looks like a kangaroo caught in the headlights.
The science of managing people needs to be promoted and
management needs to be seen as a skill just like medicine, engineering or other
professions. Otherwise it cannot ever be considered as a profession in its own
right. Thus far it is an occupation where many simply follow the edicts of
their personality. Many managers simply are not aware that what they are doing
is counterproductive.
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