Scaling the Pyramid
Take charge of the hierarchy before the hierarchy takes charge of you
A good friend of mine recently started a new job at a large public-sector social services agency. We both agreed that it was a big step up from her previous job. Yet despite the high expectations, she went home from work every day exhausted and unhappy.
Her immediate supervisor, she explained, was so intent on planning for her own impending retirement that she showed little interest in telling my friend what her duties were. Her co-workers seemed to spend more time complaining about their jobs than actually doing them. And the procedural paperwork and meetings were endless. She felt like the proverbial cog in a big, obsolete machine.
For as long as big business has existed, managers have been trying to flatten and humanize bureaucracies. Yet ultimately, these monuments to procedure endure. We just can't help ourselves, it seems. Whether we're organizing our closets or planning a mission to the moon, human beings naturally think in terms of hierarchies.
Hierarchies persist because they give people a good sense of their place in the world, notes Harold Leavitt, Kilpatrick Professor of Organizational Behavior and Psychology Emeritus at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Our position in the organization is a useful measure of how much we have accomplished and how far we have yet to go to achieve our ultimate goals. "[Our position in the hierarchy] gives us an opportunity to fulfill our sense of achievement and our drive to be successful," he argues. "So we hate them and we love them. And that makes it tough."
Our desire to humanize bureaucracies, however, has created something of a vacuum. Teamwork and empowerment sound great in theory, but ultimately somebody has to arbitrate disagreements and make the hard decisions.
"There is a naive insistence that employees do their best work when they're free to manage themselves," says Bruce Tulgan, founder of Rainmaker Thinking Inc., in New Haven, Conn. "My response is, what color is the sky in that world? It just doesn't line up with the real challenges people face most every day in the workplace."
Is there a middle ground, somewhere between mind-numbing rigidity and a rising tide of anarchy?
The first thing managers must do is realize they are, in fact, in charge. Traditional command-and-control styles of management have rightly fallen out of favor. But employees do need direction, and it is up to their managers to provide it.
"What engages an employee is a strong boss who's constantly clarifying the mission and clarifying the role of the individual in relation to the mission," says Tulgan.
It's about more than engaging your employees, however. You must also take control of the organization itself. If departments, positions, and procedures have outlived their usefulness, you must either eliminate them or find ways to adapt them to changing conditions.
Like them or not, hierarchies are here to stay, Leavitt believes. The best we can do, he says, is work constantly to ensure that they don't become lumbering bureaucracies that ultimately collapse under their own weight.
— Dayton Fandray
(Read@Work)
Leading by the Book
Harold Leavitt explores the logic of hierarchies and offers some terrific tips for taming them in his book Top Down (Harvard Business School Press, 2005).
In It's Okay to Be the Boss (Collins, 2007), Bruce Tulgan takes aim at "false nice guy" managers and what he considers an "epidemic of undermanagement."
At first glance, it appears that authors Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton have staked out positions on opposite ends of the management spectrum in their book The Carrot Principle (Free Press, 2007). The common thread, however, is engagement. Organizations succeed when managers give direct reports the tools they need to get the job done, correct them when they come up short, and reward them when they get things right. — D.F.
