Bottom up Management
November 26, 2007 by Raj Sheelvant
HCL Technologies, an Indian Info tech company is taking a unique approach to hold its management accountable. In the article titled Employee is always right, Business Week investigates new and quirky approach the company is taking where every employee gets to grade the performance of their managers! Not only that, everyone gets to see those results. Every manager’s performance metric is made visible and is sized up with other managers’ metrics across organization! Now, that’s taking the ‘accountability’ to a new level.
Usually, the manager’s direct manager is the one that has huge influence in measuring the performance of that manager. Though in some company’s employees provide feedback (known as 360° feedback) in evaluating their managers’ performance, this process is discrete and I suspect has less weight. As long as the manager produced the deliverable, how that deliverable was produced was less important. An IT manager could only focus on producing the deliverable to be successful within the organization even though that manager had produced the results by micromanaging the employees or by even being a task master. But, by asking all the employees to rank their manager and making those results public (within the firm) the HCL’s executives are sending a powerful message to the managers as well as the employees. To be successful, now the IT Manager needs to focus on not only the deliverables but also on the process of getting it done. IT manager needs to become an expert in understanding the unique skill of each employee and motivate/inspire them to perform to the target. Employees now have far more power in influencing the determination of performance of their manager.
Managing employees in Knowledge Economy (skilled labor) is very different from managing employees in Industrial Economy (semi skilled labor). Taking advantage of ‘Wisdom of the crowd’, I think every employee can provide incentives for the managers to learn and become better in people management. Though there are few shortcomings with this approach, in the long run, the “bottom up management” is a better way to drive manager accountability.
Popularity: 61% [?]
Related posts:
