Management Fads No Substitute for Hard Work

Picture this: An employee of your company enters Chapters or The Oxford Book Store and asks to see the section for books on management.

There he finds shelves and shelves of management and leadership “best-sellers.”

Searching for something that will help him understand the latest directive on team management from corporate headquarters, he finds texts on mission and vision statements, the seven habits of high effective whomever, empowerment, self-directed teams and 360-degree appraisals.

Understandably bewildered by all these titles, he gets out as quickly as possible.

While few employees will enter a bookstore to seek the source of a flavour-of-the-month management theory, many are bewildered by being exposed to the “latest and best” management theory and they will candidly express contempt for such misguided attempts to change the culture.

They perceive the never-ending stream of fads as yet another management attempt for a quick cure of institutional illnesses with a dose of the newest magical medicine.

The problem with cure-alls is that they are all too often prescribed without a diagnosis. It’s like a doctor telling a patient, “I’ve found this great medicine, it cures anything and everything” without once asking the patient what’s wrong.

This is not something a doctor would do. A doctor is trained to discover the cause of you malady and to prescribe the appropriate treatment.

Similarly, it takes a trained eye to diagnose organizational maladies and to prescribe a series of treatments or interventions, aimed at curing the maladies and getting the organization to function in an appropriate manner.

It also takes an organization that is determined to make positive changes and willing to undergo the hard work it takes to change.

The trouble is that new fads and theories of managing and leading are being created almost monthly. Great promises are made that all will be better if you take our medicine.

However, Dr. Quinby’s Magic Medicine Show no longer rises the railroad from town to town, patent medicines and magical elixirs having been long ago relegated to the level of quack medicine.

In fairness, some management theories and some authors have stood the test of time and continue to provide valuable advice to those seeking a better way of doing things.

Canada’s own Henry Mintzburg is a fine example of a management theoretician whose work is research-based, practical and useful. Mintzburg is hardly a best-selling author when compared to many “flash in the pan” authors, but he has a great many followers.

The validity of the ideas is not in question, but rather the assumption of some top managers that they can make quantum changes in the behaviour and morale of a mass of employees simply by hanging framed vision statements on company walls – and then making speeches to a captive audience.

The singular message the employees have asked the authors to send to management is, “Stop trying to change our behaviour until you change yours.”

After years of being subjected to anything from Tom Peter’s In Search of Excellence to a host of theories on business process re-engineering and the balanced scorecard, thoughtful managers and leaders are once again realizing that anything of value takes thought, work and effort.

If the leaders and managers are not prepared to get down in the trenches and do the hard work necessary to change their organization, no theory, no fad of management, will ever have any significant or lasting positive effect on the organization.

Skilful leaders will study their organization, see what needs to be done and then go and do it.

They will examine each trend in management, take the best of what it has to offer and blend it in with their intuitive sense of what needs to e done to revitalize their organization.

It’s not a sin to borrow from various sources to make your organization a success. It is a sin to buy a prescription without understanding the root causes.

The London Free Press, Monday, March 15, 2004