My thoughts on Management

So many thoughts have been clouding my mind for the past 3 weeks; yet none have been published. Thoughts on the most simple of problems that can happen in an organization: leadership change. A leadership change is no doubt a phenomenon that needs to be handled with care, for a rash decision by either side ultimately affects only the organization (the loyal guy that I am!!). People like to say nobody is indispensable but only those involved in the blood bath called IT understand what it means..you are ‘used’ to the point beyond which you are no longer required and at any point of time between the origin and the destination you are indeed indispensable, no exceptions made!! And why is all this generalization being made: to understand the mindset of ‘established’ resources and their difficulties in changing to a different leadership style. These resources, over a period of time, become masters of their respective areas that the question of dispensing with them is equivalent to asking a member of BCCI if Sachin can be ‘dropped’ for a match! The value-add that this presents to the organization does not come without a cost, though. They are so used to their own way of running things, that any minor change (leave alone a radical one) to the way they are being managed arouses a strong feeling of discomfort in them. And if the style of the management changes from macro to micro, it is all the more worse. People feel that every action of theirs is being questioned, they are left ‘out of the loop’ on important discussions and there exists in office, a non-conducive atmosphere for growth. This is where I beg to differ: the problem is not with Micro-management as a style; it is in the way it is being implemented by the manager that causes all these problems. Otherwise micro-management is as good a style as any other management technique; the only caveat being its success depends a lot on the manager who uses it. The results of an incorrect implementation are what I am seeing at office today. The organization is losing out on a well trained manager, the all-too-important SMEs and most important of all: their productive time is wasted on unnecessary plots to pin each other down!

The other point where I feel corporate ethics haven’t been upheld is in the way people are seeking a resolution to this issue: an open discussion is all that is required to put all this out of everyone’s mind and not an escalation. An escalation for all these operational and ‘soft’ issues, to the next level, is nothing short of a student going to his headmistress (intentional reference to a female!!) that his teacher (male and intentional again!!, let me see if I can decode this when I come back to this post some time later) for some subject X has changed. A closed mind can never see what can come out of a fair discussion and it never happened here. A meeting addressing everybody’s concerns with the new manager and his boss (Headmistress, it is!!) would be my solution and in my humble opinion, one that would work definitely rather than a clandestine session with each one, which only serves to add to the animosity.

No, the see-saw is too tilted now..Too much has been said about Mr.X that this post will be better off without him and there are too many cases to be presented against him. After all, this is a post on my thoughts on management and not on Mr.X!!