subject: Managing A 21st Century Organisation [print this page] Due to increases in global markets, mass media and international travel, companies are facing a constant battle to maintain their market share and keep their once loyal consumers happy. Even the small locally based companies with small national outlets are feeling the pressure from the global giants that encroach upon their territory. In his book, Key Management Ideas, Stuart Crainer writes, "Currently, some 37,000 parent companies control over 200,000 subsidiaries abroad. Some 40% of the total assets of the world's 100 largest companies are already located outside their home countries." As such, companies of all sizes are finding that in order to stay ahead of the competition and to keep up with shifting customer demands and loyalties, a program of continuous organisational change is necessary.
However despite such necessity many attempts at change have been fraught with failures. During the 1980s and 1990s, when nearly every major US company was attempting some kind of change initiative, between 50 to 70% of all efforts ended in failure. One reason for this is that for a change in the style and culture of an organisation to succeed, certain criteria must first be met. Many times, companies implement changes without first laying the necessary groundwork or securing the necessary resources or support; a step that could jeopardise the successfulness of the subsequent change program.
To combat such failures and to reinvent ourselves into truly 21st century organisations, we must be prepared to alter our commonly held belief systems regarding the role of managers and workers. Traditionally management has always been viewed as the bosses, who command, whilst the workers provide the labour. However recent thought suggests that the role of modern managers is to integrate with, support and lead the workforce rather than to divide and conquer. As Crainer states, "management and leadership are seen as inextricably linked." Managers of modern organisations need to act as guiding leaders to their workforce, observant to their needs and receptive to their ideas. Robert Waterman, author of The Frontiers of Excellence, stated that modern managers must act more as "coaches not as the boss."
Leadership guru, Warren Bennis interviewed 90 well-known effective leaders from all walks of life, and highlighted several characteristics they all shared. In brief leaders need to inspire and generate followers that will carry on the message and shape their own actions in accordance to what is being said. Through the leaders example of self-belief, consistency and trustworthiness, followers can learn and become motivated to pursue the vision to completion.
Reiterating this opinion, a speech given in 1999 by Ian McCartney, the then UK Minister of State for Competitiveness, said that companies must first build partnerships within the workplace in order to develop and reinvent themselves as high performance organisations and went on to list several ways this building work could take place. It still provides a lesson for us today.
"First, the need to recognise and value the role of the workforce in any business. Second, the need to have a common understanding of the aims and goals of the businesses and an agreed work culture. Third, employers need to have a strategy for developing their employees - and that means all their employees, not just the highly skilled or high fliers. Fourth, employees for their part need to be encouraged and supported to identify and enhance their own skills, and fifth, and crucially, there needs to be an inclusive relationship between employers, employees and their representatives."
Peter Senge described such empowering businesses as "learning organisations" where each member of the company feels it their duty to expand their knowledge and capabilities and where management is supportive of this pursuit. As Richard Karash of Innovation Associates describes it, "A learning organization is one in which, at all levels, people are continually expanding their capability to produce the results that they really want to create."
By building such relationships and developing our workforce, we can avoid the potential risk of employee resistance that has so often been cited by many gurus as a major cause for failure in change initiatives. Unfortunately, only a handful of organisations today have a learning culture, and the transformation is, to say the least, highly problematic. One reason for this is that in order to transform into a learning organisation a company has to culturally change, a process that produces the same problems they were originally trying to counter.
Developing Teamwork
Despite the problems associated with change and developing a learning culture, all recent thinkers do agree that cooperation between management and the workforce and a sharing of some responsibilities through a reorganisation of duties must be attained if success is to be assured. To improve performance and increase operational flexibility in order to withstand the pressures of a fast changing 21st century global market, we must understand that to get results we need to give up some control. Cross-functional teamwork must be developed to fulfil both the short term and long term objectives of our companies.
A cross-functional team consists of members from all levels of an organisation, each with differing functional experience, who can work together towards the achievement of a common objective. Often these teams are self-directed, following an agreed specified goal, at other times they are lead by a manager or team-leader.
Through his book Management by Objectives, Peter Drucker advocated a highly systematic method of management that was well defined and structured with decision-making being seen as a multi-stage process. 21st century companies need to move towards a much flatter, less hierarchical organisational structure that chooses a less teleological, more hands-on, interactive approach to problem solving and direction setting. Cross-functional teams help achieve, and is more suited to, this modern way of working.
Enabling organisational wide teamwork requires dismantling the traditional hierarchy of roles and transferring many of the responsibilities usually associated with management to the teams. When achieved, this finely tuned balancing act allows a business much more flexibility in the way work is assigned and carried out. Dependent on where the need is, teams can be formed to handle the increased workload of that section. This allows staff to increase their potential and allows for personal growth and an increased sense of self-worth within the organisation.
Glen Parker, author of Cross-Functional Teams, outlined the benefits of implementing this particular team approach to ones workplace. Common to all his reasons is the fact that teamwork builds relationships between employers, employees and the separate functional departments, and pools talent from varying disciplines and backgrounds from across the organisation to help solve particular problems. As such, very innovative results and methods may be introduced that would otherwise have been missed.
Conclusion
Many may be struck by the fact that nothing has been said of productivity, quality or other methods for improving bottom line results that are common to most business school curriculum. Though these areas are still relevant today, especially when considering the shortened product life cycle and the need to speed up internal shop floor processes to meet demand, modern management thought has tended, over the last few decades at least, to focus more on the softer areas including staff, skills and managerial style. This does not mean that the harder areas of organisational structure, strategy and systems have been dismissed, far from it, only the guru's attention has more recently moved elsewhere.
Business writer and consultant Tom Peters listed several attributes of modern management that correspond to the overriding theme of this article and on modern management theory in general:
1. Involve everyone in everything.
2. Use self-managing teams i.e. relinquish authoritarian leadership.
3. Listen, celebrate and recognise.
4. Spend time lavishly on recruitment.
5. Train and retrain.
6. Provide incentive pay for everyone.
7. Provide an employment guarantee.
8. Simplify and/or reduce structure.
9. Reconceive the middle manager's role as a facilitator.
10. Eliminate bureaucratic rules and humiliating conditions.
Staff at all levels must be encouraged to better themselves and to reach out for greater responsibilities. Through effective leadership, teamwork and creating learning cultures, modern day mangers can build organisations that are adaptable yet profitable. By introducing less hierarchical structures that allow information to flow more easily through the organisation, allowing knowledge to be transferred rapidly to where it is needed, means that we can become better equipped to withstand the modern pressures brought about through globalisation and a growing sophistication in customer expectations. In short we will build organisations to last.
