Managerial Practices: The elements of managerial accountabilities

Speaker A I'd like to give you a little background on my background with Elliot Jack. I was a manager in retailing and then worked in General Electric, and I worked for At T, and I found the company very dysfunctional. So I went back for a master's in business administration focusing on human behavior and managing organizations, and I didn't find any of the material I was studying useful as an experienced manager. I was asked to speak at the American Management Association conference in 1982, and the keynote speak was a man by the name of Elliot Jacks. And I listened to Elliot Chung and I thought, this is the first person I've ever heard who has a coherent set of principles and practices in how to manage an organization so that it is as productive and profitable as possible and at the same time as equally or perhaps even more important, is a very healthy place for people to work. So I wrote up his speech and went back and talked to him and said, I really would like to pursue the work that you're doing. And I started to study with him, and an organization asked him if there was a consultant who could help implement his ideas into the company, and that was Novice International. And Novice is helping to sponsor this conference that is the longest running requisite organization, project or company in the world and has had excellent results with using it. And I still work with Nova's off and on when they're in a growth cycle or something unusual is happening in the company. And as a result of my work, I wrote this book that's available in English and Spanish, and you all will receive a copy of it, thanks to novice at the conference. And it's available in English. The English copy is blue and the Spanish copy is red. It will also be published within the next six months in Portuguese. So the book contains much of the background on the material that we're going to be speaking on today so that you can read more about it later. And I also have my Internet, my website in here so that if you have further questions, you can just send me an email and say, I didn't understand this. Could you tell me a little bit more about that? Because all three of us do that for people who are interested in learning about this way of operating an organization. So the very first slide is a quote from Elliot's book. Elliot wrote in his he died five years ago. In his lifetime, he wrote 20 books. One of them that is particularly of interest is called Social Power and the CEO. And another book that is a basic book that he wrote is called Requisite Organization, which is the umbrella name for all of this way of working. And that is also available in Spanish. It was translated by one of the professors down here who worked with Elliot for a long time. There's a long tradition of implementing reckless organization projects in Argentina. And there are a number of very experienced consultants down here. I think you can read that. And that's sort of the basis from which we start. There is a sensible, comprehensive, science based way to manage our organizations for profitability and for the health of the individuals. So that it's possible for us to stand here and say, this is how we work in organizations. And in the title, on the title page of my book, I have these three circles. One circle stands for the structure of the organization. The second is for putting the right people in the right roles. And the third one is ensuring that all your managers use good, sensible, consistent leadership practices from the CEO right straight down to your first line managers. And that's why we have these three things. It starts with the reason they're called managerial leadership practices is that Elliot wants to ensure that everybody understands that all managers must be leaders. The two go together and that leadership doesn't exist in a vacuum. And it doesn't matter what your leadership style is, as long as you carry through the right practices. And organizations achieve their results through their managerial leadership group, down through the organization. Accountability authority cascades down through an organization that is an employment organization, from the owner and then the board of directors, that there is a board to the CEO who then breaks up his and her work as that person sees fit into roles and delegates. Accountability and authority. There's very specific accountability and authority that must be put into managerial roles in order for the system to operate properly. Managers are accountable for the results of the work and for the working behavior of their subordinates. This is a key principle of this work and it's one that can take a lot of discussion and a lot of thinking about. But this is primary managerial accountability. They're also accountable for building a team of subordinates to achieve the work of their unit. They're accountable for their own personal effectiveness. Managers have their own work to do. They do not delegate all of their work. As Jerry, I think, was telling you this morning, work has to be done at a certain level. So the chaos or the art is to figure out what work is needed at each level, what work can be delegated, what work you get some help from your supporting on. And finally, they have to exercise managerial leadership. And I hope you've had the morning with us and the afternoon with us. You have a better sense specifically of what we mean about exercising managerial leadership. Now, if that is the capability that a manager must have, there is a commensurate authority that must go with that. And that authority is they do not have to have a subordinate working with them that they do not believe can do the work in the role and I think that's a very illustrative point of Elliot's very common sense approach to how organizations can best work. Because obviously, if you're a manager of a unit and you're given work to do in your unit and you're given an employee to work for you, then you don't think and do that work. How can you be held accountable for the work of that subordinate? So each manager has the right to say, I do not believe this person is capable of doing the work boss that you're assigning to me to get my unit to complete, and it's only on the dent. Would you agree with that? And how many of you who are managers have had the experience where you were given an employee and said, oh, good old John here, we have to find a place for him, so you take him. Have any of you had that experience? Have you seen that? I see some heads nodding back and it begins to erode the two essential things that we work for here. The first one is clarity. To get a role clear, to tell people what they're supposed to do and have people in the role who are capable of doing it. If you know someone is not capable of doing it, you have a very difficult situation. So each manager has the right to veto either a new employee that they don't agree with or someone that is not on a continuum basis able to do the work of. Then it's the manager who assigns tasks. When I start working in new companies, very often I see the manager of the manager going around and assigning tasks at the lower level. Well, how can the manager organize his or her time and resources if other people are assigning work to the roles? They can't. It is the manager also who makes the judgment of how well a person is doing in their role, because it's the manager who's assigning tasks to each of their subordinates, not anyone else. So again, I found in many companies I worked in the manager's, manager decided what marriage increase someone should have or what their annual appraisal should look like. That is not an appropriate practice if you want clarity. And it's the clarity that breeds trust in an organization. And I would say trust is the underlying principle of all of this work. And every time I'm trying to assist managers in thinking through problems, one of the questions I always ask them is if you do this, will that make it a more trustworthy organization or less? Always think about is this building trust between people in the organization and people and the organization? And lastly, which is part of the first point, if someone is in a role, the role changes, becomes more complex, needs new kinds of technology, and the individual isn't capable of doing the role the way you need it done. Then you have the right to discuss with human resources and your manager that this person must be removed. And then they take over, looking for and assisting that person to find a role in the organization. If a role exists. And that's part of the fairness and the clarity and the trust building that results from working this way back to the manager's accountability and authority. Now, what about the relationship between the manager and the subordinate? And there's several places in the English language where there is a problem in the language, and Elliot was very precise about language. There is no other word in English for someone who works for a manager than the word subordinate. But the word subordinate has a slightly negative intention in English. Nonetheless, there is no other word so that we use it to again have clarity. The manager is accountable to give work to the subordinate. The subordinate is accountable for doing the work that the manager assigns. However, it is a two way working relationship, but the manager is held accountable because he or she it's the one who assigns the resources for the task. The subordinate doesn't choose the resources they have. The manager allocates the resources. The subordinate is accountable for using their best efforts to complete the task in the way the manager has assigned it. And instead of calling appraisal performance appraisal in English, elliot calls it personal Effectiveness appraisal. It's how well the person applied themselves to do the work. It isn't a matter of counting numbers of things they achieved, and Sandy and Terry will address that in greater detail. And the subordinate is also accountable for informing the managers if problems arise.