Have you ever noticed the difficulty communicating to someone so that they exactly understand an idea that is crystal clear in your own mind? We all seem to work with an internal filter that receives information, adjusts it to suit our basic bias, cognitive abilities and personal stories and experiences. If there was only one language and we all had a common background communicating would be a lot easier. Even better would be a read-o-graph that displayed exactly the script that was being received. I am always amazed by the skill of the translator taking one language and immediately voicing it back in another language. I am sure it isn’t an exact translation but at least there are no international incidents resulting from the slight reinterpretations that do occur.
The reality today is that we are starting to need instantaneous translations into the world of the ‘forty year old male’, or the ‘twenty-five year old female’, or the ‘teenager’ or....
In any organization we like to think that there is a corporate culture that is understood by all. Again if we were all cloned genetically and experientially this might have some chance of being a reality. Organizations are many layered with teams and groups but the constituent parts at the foundation are always individuals, individuals who have a unique understanding of goals and a unique way of acting on their understanding.
Site based management is a common management practice intended to divest decision making to the ‘front lines’ where decisions can more accurately reflect the needs of clients and the local conditions. Seems good in theory, but considering the wobbly nature of communication and the insistence of people to behave as individuals site based management can actually be a recipe, at best , for the dilution of corporate intent , and at worst, the collapse of the corporate structure.
The Bay seems to be going through another rebirth, and again the aim is to try to create an ‘upscale’ market retail environment. I say ‘again’ because this story has been told many times before. The Hudson Bay store used to be on my lunch time walk, and after the start of one of these rebirthings I recall one lunch hour when I witnessed a gaggle of retailers, led by a blond bespectacled individual, going through the redesigned store waving and gesturing. Soon after what was once a spacious retail floor became crowded with racks, tables, bins and other displays reminiscent of a bargain -basement . I could never imaging that ‘head office’ intended each rebirth to be played out this way. Was this restructuring of a head office renovation the product of a ‘local’ mindset?
Defining corporate goals and priorities....
The communication of corporate goals suffers each time the explanation occurs. So imagine what is left of the original when head office tells the national organization who then tells the regional organization who then tells the local / franchise level. Now add the trend in some organization where each level can also develop goals and priorities. This is supposed to happen under the umbrella of the parent, but it doesn’t take much to imagine all the scattered themes and variations of the corporate goal that ultimately find airtime.
Accountability....
The variety of translations of corporate culture that results from site base management is also the limiting factor in any attempt to demonstrate accountability. Is there any wonder that the site-based managed systems of health care and education are under attack for their inability to justify their worth when each level reads and writes their own script, fights with the goals of other teams and seems to have little regard for the goals set out by government.
The question of equity.....
The need to assume that the sites are ‘equal’ is another failing of the site-based management paradigm. If this assumption did not exist the parent would be dictating a differentiation of the sites – not part of the paradigm. Sometimes the sites are given a structure that allows for the self-identification of variations leading to enhanced considerations from the parent. The end game here is that the site based managers determine their variations based on their understanding and the chance that they will receive some sort of enhancement. Sounds like a bell ringing for a salivating dog.
A shortage of leaders....
The biggest failing of the site-based management paradigm is the assumption that there are sufficient leaders to go around. In addition to the consequences of a ‘Peter-principled’ corporate reality statistically speaking there are just not enough champions to go around. Even if there were enough people, there would not be enough money to pay all the superlative leaders required for all the sites being managed. Even less likely, given the CEO corporate structure, is the chance that site based managers, who are making the frontline decisions, will actually be paid more than the CEO or managers at the upper levels.
Awareness to the rescue....
So are there any benefits to site-based management? They only start to surface when the shortfalls are accounted for.
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