Management is not ready for chaos

Your management team is not ready for chaos. They have enough trouble dealing with change. But chaos? Not even close to ready. If you accept the premise that the next few years will be times of extraordinary change – chaos – then how is your management team ready to deal with it?

The problem is that there are too many structural impediments with management today to be ready to deal with chaos.

Insulated executives

Pundits harp on top CEO pay and severance packages and they have a point. But the big issue they miss is that pay and security offered by the massive money paid to run companies insulates the executives from the very customers and employees that support the business. For example, how tone deaf does it tell you executives are when auto executives fly to Washington, D.C., for congressional bailout hearings in corporate jets? Or CEO’s still earning millions of dollars in compensation after Washington bails them out?

Insulated executives can’t see the very changes they need to see in order to steer the company in the right direction – and secure your job.

Structure, not change

Because public companies need to provide “guidance” to stockholders, business practices are put in place to smooth out earnings and information to shareholders. Budgets are built in advance and last a year, with changes. Earnings are often projected for the next quarter. There is tremendous effort put into hitting these financial targets.

This makes some sense, of course. Shareholders own the company. But the structure forces the companies down a path that makes them completely miss the game-changing opportunity staring at them in the face. Do you believe your management team can track changes to the business daily at the department level and react to the changes? Do you believe your management team is reviewing the market and can quickly build a product to match the competition? Do you believe your management team has a feedback mechanism to truly listen to customers and build in changes based on the feedback?

Management culture is not ready for chaos

Management is more concerned about the time you spend on the job then the results you get from your work. Management builds goals for their department – which looks logical – but ignores building methods to measure individual work to the goals. Management is more concerned about making sure you are willing to work longer hours than figuring out how to do the work smarter that fits into the results needed for the week. Management is more concerned about getting their own work done then figuring out the best ways to use the skills of the people reporting to them.

Management doesn’t think

There is no time. When there is a natural down time between projects, the management team takes no time to think through what they did on the project and how to improve the process. There is no advancement of management practice through observation and improvement. Managers are not managers now; they are individual contributors who happen to have people reporting to them. It’s tough to deal with change – much less chaos – when there is no opportunity to think through the events happening around them.

No, management isn’t ready to manage through chaos. That makes our work more difficult to manage – and to build our accomplishments.

How will you work for accomplishments in this management chaos?