Unfortunately, many managers think of the job of managing as a matter of controlling employee behavior. Despite lip service to “empowerment” and “leadership”, the main thrust of management is to ensure that employees do exactly what management wants them to do.
Under such regimes, employees who disagree with a manager or refuse to do something are “insubordinate” and therefore dangerous. Many times, the HR group begins to compile a dossier on the “troublemaker” who can’t be adequately controlled.
The natural result of seeing management as a control function is the creation of brittle organizations that can’t adapt to new conditions. Often this happens because multiple managers in multiple stovepiped groups set up conflicting power structures, each of which is trying to “control” what’s going on. Worst case, you end up with endless turf wars, with managers involved in a supercharged political atmosphere.
Whenever that happens, productive work becomes difficult if not impossible. Individual initiative is killed in favor of a “let’s wait and see what the boss says” mentality. For example, sales professionals who are micromanaged in this way pay a fairly major productivity tax, probably of around 30 percent. That’s 30 percent more sales that could be closed if the sales team didn’t have some bozo looking over their shoulder and meddling with the sale.
By contrast, when a corporate culture thinks of management primary as a service position, you get coaches rather than dictators. Freed of the burden of attempt to “control things”, managers can more easily set a direction and to obtain the resources that employees need to get the job done. There’s less talk about “leadership” and “empowerment” and more helping people to become more successful.
When managers are seen as being “in service”, decision-making more naturally moves down to the lowest appropriate level of the company. Teams tend to form their own rules and direction without interference. Just as importantly, the impetus for huge management salaries goes away and the gulf between management and employees shrinks. That’s a good thing.
BTW, if you want to see how this kind of management works, look at any sales team that has 1) low turnover, and 2) high productivity. Sales coaching is a relatively well-understood phenomenon and, while there are plenty of controlling sales managers, there are a fair number who understand this “in service” idea and put it into daily practice.
