I read an article today about how a poor management decision lead to a company losing a fortune as a result of ignoring the request of a worker and it got me thinking – Why do we need management?
It’s clear that we need leaders and strategic decision makers but what do managers actually do? I turned to Mr Google for help and the first thing that popped up was a definition of manager ‘A person responsible for controlling or administering an organisation or group of staff.’.
Seems like a pretty good definition but why do we need them? Let’s turn to the bees. A beehive has no management structure, it goes about achieving its corporate aims without any control. It consists only of individuals doing work to move towards a well-communicated strategic objective. All workers have a vested interest in the hive achieving that objective. When decisions need to be made then it is the workers themselves who make those decisions because they have been well-trained and they fully understand the ultimate goal. There is no management structure to which they can turn and hence decisions are taken quickly and effectively by those actually doing the job.
Increasingly we are able to replace workers who just carry out predetermined tasks with automation and hence we need thinking workers not those that need to be managed. When we achieve thinking workers who understand the corporate goal and are signed up to it then all we need are leaders and managers and management become redundant.
Many say the move to working from home has made management more difficult and many businesses are insisting workers return to the office in order to be managed. This is poor thinking. The solution is to enable workers to think for themselves and then geography becomes irrelevant along with the managers who are currently ‘struggling’ to control and administer their staff.
If you want to look at this further we have both manufacturing and service simulations to enable everyone to be more effective. Please contact us for details. https://www.wellsassoc.co.uk/contact/.
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