No More White Knight Management

  Leadership   ProjectsAtWork  

Why don’t we just stop reengineering and de-layering and restructuring and decentralizing and instead start thinking?

Management is a curious phenomenon. It is generously paid, enormously influential, and significantly devoid of common sense. At least, the hype about management lacks common sense, as does too much of the practice…

To "turn around" is to end up facing the same way. Maybe that is the problem: all this turning around. Might not the white knight of management be the black hole of organizations?         

Does anyone want to work for a manager who lacks the qualities of leadership? That can be pretty discouraging. Well, how about a leader who doesn’t practice management? That can be pretty alienating; he or she is unlikely to know what is going on. Instead of isolating leadership, we need to diffuse it, throughout the organization, into the ranks of managers and beyond.        

We hear a great deal about micro managing these days — managers who meddle in the work of their reports. Sure it can be a problem. But far more serious now is macro managing — managers who sit on top, pronouncing their great strategies and imposing their abstract performance standards while everyone else is supposed to scurry around “implementing.”…

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