smart management holding back some resources may actually do you good
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Smart Management:
Holding Back Some Resources May Actually Do You Good!
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Who knew that doling out more and more resources for employees was actually bad
for them?
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Employees often need more resources, to get a project done or to meet a deadline.
• Smart managers however know that offering many resources to get a job done may actually lead to high levels of self-sufficiency that employees would no longer need each other’s cooperation to solve problems.
• This would lead to a corporate culture where employees lack co-operation among each other
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…and what follows?
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A crippled organization with a less competitive and less responsive task
force.
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Surely, bad for business!
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SMART AND EFFECTIVE MANAGERS EVEN GO AS FAR AS WITHHOLDING OR TAKING AWAY RESOURCES TO FORCE THEIR EMPLOYEES TO RELY MORE ON EACH OTHER.
Surprisingly, this tactic has been proven to give better results.
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By taking away resources, the “reciprocity” of workers is increased.
• Reciprocity, as Yves Morieux and Peter Tollman explain in their book – Six Simple Rules: How to Manage Complexity Without Getting Complicated – is the “quality that people have a mutual interest in cooperation, and that to succeed, they have no choice but to depend on one another”.
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Increasing employees’ reciprocity is one way of going beyond traditional management practices and adopting smart simplicity.
It is possible to make employees more cooperative and autonomous so they
can find solutions to work-related problems more efficiently.
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Cooperation and autonomy are extremely crucial to organizations if they are to maintain a competitive edge.
Achieving real cooperation where employees keep aside their self-interests to achieve a common target is difficult.
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When resources are removed or withheld from them, employees tend to
rely more on each other.
Morieux and Tollman explained this phenomenon using a real case study
of an industrial company.
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The company was faced with declining levels of quality and the management decided to deal
with the problem.
• It decided to raise investment in R&D for which it had to cut costs in other areas to generate more funds.
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It experimented with various solutions one of which was to
reduce the costs of the procurement department by 20% without erosion of on-
time delivery or supply quality.
The employees in the procurement department had
two roles.
One group (strategizing group) decided how to buy goods in a category and the other group
(buying group) actually executed the decision, i.e. it
did the buying.
At a point of time, the procurement department
failed to meet the cost-cutting targets and a blame game
ensued.
Meanwhile, the operating department of the company, which was also asked to work on cost-reduction, bypassed
the procurement unit and was doing its own buying.
What was lacking in this company was cooperation.
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COOPERATION BETWEEN THE PROCUREMENT AND OPERATIONS DEPARTMENT AND BETWEEN THE TWO GROUPS WITHIN THE PROCUREMENT DEPARTMENT WAS MISSING AND THEY WERE ISOLATED FROM ONE ANOTHER BECAUSE OF DIFFERING OBJECTIVES.
A new approach was needed here.
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The management clarified objectives for each department and ordered the strategizing group in the procurement department to innovate buying strategies.
• As a result, a community of practice developed where the strategists and buyers worked together, as the strategists got to know what the buyers needed and the buyers helped the strategists with developing innovative buying strategies.
The company also developed overlap objectives where one group was forced to take the needs of the other group into account.
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THE NEXT STEP IS WHERE THE RESOURCE TACTIC WAS APPLIED.
The management cut the budget of the operating department.
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Because of limited resources, the operating department was forced to
cooperate with the procurement department as it did not have sufficient
funds to buy on its own.
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Subsequently, the departments met their targets of cost-reduction without
affecting supply quality!
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Now, that’s smart management!
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Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship
C-4, IIT-H Foundation, Gachibowli, Hyderabad
9618402751, 9000600247
Reach us at:[email protected] [email protected]@accuprosys.com
For more details, please visit: www.accuprosys.com
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