Gary Hamel: Unshackling Employees from Head Office Control - Gary Hamel’s Management 2.0 - WSJ

Description

In a recent post I promised that I’d lay out a blueprint for building a company that’s as nimble as change itself—and I will, but first I’d like to share an anecdote about a simple experiment in workplace freedom.

In most organizations, the decision-making freedoms of frontline employees are highly circumscribed. Sales reps, call center staff, office managers, and assembly line workers are usually trussed up in tangle of top-down policies, “best practices,” and standard operating procedures. Yet it’s impossible to build a highly adaptable organization without first expanding the scope of employee freedom. To create an organization that’s adaptable and innovative, people need the freedom to challenge precedent, to “waste” time, to go outside of channels, to experiment, to take risks and to follow their passions.

Interestingly, humanity’s most adaptable social system—democracies and markets—are those that extend the greatest freedom to their constituents. In a democracy, you don’t need anyone’s permission to form a new political party, publish a politically charged article, or organize a “tea party.” And in open markets, individuals are free to buy and invest as they see fit. When compared to the typical corporate leviathan, these systems are remarkably under -managed.

In most languages, “control” is the first synonym for the word “manage.” Control is about spotting and correcting deviations from pre-defined standards; thus to control one must first constrain. Standards, policies and rules are important—no organization can exist or survive without them. The problem, though, is that managers (and public sector bureaucrats) are incentivized to enlarge, rather than reduce, the scope of their regulatory powers. More rules mean more things to control, which in turn means more job security and more power. The impetus to control works like a ratchet—as the years pass, the number of rules and regulations steadily increase. That’s why older ...

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http://blogs.wsj.com/management/2009/08/07/unshackling-employees/?mod=rss_WSJBlog