February 02, 2009

Management: Who's In Charge?


"If you don't understand that you work for your mislabeled 'subordinates,' then you know nothing of leadership. You know only tyranny."

Dee Hock
Founder and CEO Emeritus Visa International

I really like this. In the first 17 words he tells us:
  1. Who reports to who says little of an individual's importance to the organization.
  2. Reporting relationships are intertwined, three dimensional.
  3. Real leaders understand points 1 and 2 while others don't.
However I don't believe he needed the last sentence. Tyranny implies an ongoing power and in a free society such as ours, individuals subjected to tyrannical leadership will elect to leave as soon as possible. There's no real power in that.

That being true, maybe a better statement would be "You know only tyranny, only for a short time."

Authoritarian structure school of management advocates may disagree.

What do you think?

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4 comments :

  1. AnonymousFebruary 2, 2009 at 9:15 AM

    Working from home, virtual employees, out sourcing, contract employees all appear to benefit the company but not completely. This also results in a lessening of the grip the company has on its employees.

    There still are reporting relationships but increasingly employees have a "dotted line" power that can be significant. The question is how do they choose to use it?

    In the best companies managers and managed see themselves as relative equals in terms of their contributions to the organization. Some have additional responsibility to channel the efforts of everyone towards one common goal (the managers) but not in a dictatorial sense.

    This is a big change from the way things have been done and we're not there completely. If we use a 12 month calendar analogy with January as the beginning of the change and December when the change is complete, I would guess we are somewhere in late February, early March.

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  2. AnonymousFebruary 2, 2009 at 11:33 AM

    I don't get it. Someone has to be in charge and tell everyone else what to do. If not how do you get things done?

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  3. AnonymousFebruary 2, 2009 at 4:53 PM

    Managing is not about telling others what to do. It's about steering human resources to achievement of a common goal. And those human resources includes the manager steering them self as well.

    If you have to order that done, you'll never get there.

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  4. CoyoteFebruary 3, 2009 at 7:37 AM

    Well said Lyle.

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