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    Core Management Principles: No Flavors of the Month
    Core Management Principles: No Flavors of the Month
    Core Management Principles: No Flavors of the Month
    Ebook149 pages1 hour

    Core Management Principles: No Flavors of the Month

    By Dimitri Pojidaeff

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    About this ebook

    Managers trying to do a better job have plenty flavors of the month to choose from: total quality management, continuous improvement, empowerment, teamworkthe list is endless.

    Everyone is searching for a magic bullet to improve productivity; however, they would have greater success in relying on the core principles of effective management, identified more than fifty years ago.

    Scholars over the years have presented the principles from different viewpoints and with different terminology, but it boils down to this: Employees want to be masters of their own fate and to have a real sense of ownership. When provided with an organizational climate that allows this, employees are able to use their own intrinsic motivation to improve productivity and maintain high quality and good service.

    Good managers know that people are the only sustainable competitive advantage. They require practical guidance and tools, not flavors of the month, to support employees in realizing their full potential. Create and sustain a productive workplace from the moment you hire an employee with Core Management Principles.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisheriUniverse
    Release dateApr 28, 2012
    ISBN9781475912678
    Core Management Principles: No Flavors of the Month
    Author

    Dimitri Pojidaeff

    Dimitri Pojidaeff, a graduate of Phillips Academy–Andover and Columbia University, is a management consultant specializing in organizational effectiveness and human resources management. He has taught organizational behavior and human resources management at the university level and has published several articles on organizational effectiveness. He has also been a senior human resources executive for several large organizations.

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      Book preview

      Core Management Principles - Dimitri Pojidaeff

      Contents

      Dedication

      Preface

      Chapter 1

      Chapter Ii

      Chapter Iii

      Chapter Iv

      Chapter V

      Chapter Vi

      Chapter Vii

      Chapter Viii

      Chapter Ix

      Chapter X

      Chapter Xi

      Chapter Xii

      Chapter Xiii

      Chapter Xiv

      Chapter Xv

      References

      About The Author

      DEDICATION

      In Memory of Dima

      for

      Mary and Jason

      and

      with much love and thanks

      to Olive for the time

      Preface

      It was over eighteen years ago, when we first established our consulting practice, that I became interested in all the various flavors of the month that were, and still are, so prevalent: Total Quality Management, Continuous Improvement, Empowerment, the list is endless. Everyone was, and still is, searching for the magic silver bullet. As a consultant, I wanted to be sure that I wasn’t missing something that we could offer our clients as a ready fix for their organizational problems.

      Fortunately, I already had a great deal of first-hand experience with various flavors that I had had the responsibility for implementing in my capacity as a Director of Human Resources for several large organizations in different parts of the country. All such attempts at organizational change had left me quite cynical and frustrated with an appalling lack of success in every case. I was also tired of trying to defend the use of such ineffective and bureaucratic practices as the annual performance evaluation.

      Because of this interest, I sought out my old texts and purchased a few that I didn’t have. I went back to some of the well-known original research in the whole area of organizational behavior and employee motivation: the research of Frederick Herzberg, Douglas McGregor, Abraham Maslow, Dr. Marrow and others. What immediately became clear, after reading their original works, was that there are enduring core principles of effective management, which had been clearly identified over 50 years ago. This is outlined in the first chapter, Core Principles, which is a slightly modified version of an article that was published in the Journal for Quality and Participation. (Pojidaeff, 1995, pp. 44-47)

      Different scholars over the years have presented the principles from different viewpoints and with different terminology, but the principles have remained the same: Employees wish to be masters of their own fate and to have a real sense of ownership. When provided with such an organizational climate, employees are able to use their own intrinsic motivation to improve productivity and maintain high quality and good service.

      What also became so abundantly clear was that most of the flavors of the month were valid programs; the reason that they so quickly became the latest flavor of the month, however, was, in most cases, because the core principles were neglected in their implementation. A common example is the attempt to implement Total Quality Management or Continuous Improvement without a participative management culture in which full responsibility and accountability is delegated to the individual employee.

      Since that time, many books, many articles, and many clients later, this book has been slowly developing. It is my very strong bias, and that of my partners, that the management of people is the most critical aspect of good management and productive organizations. Sales, marketing, finance, systems, engineering, production, and all other areas of any organization, are developed by people, operated by people, and managed by people. No matter what the technology, it is still also developed and operated by people. People are the only sustainable competitive advantage.

      This statement itself has, unfortunately, become one of the worst flavors of the month as most managers only pay lip service, at best, to it. There is too much evidence, however, as will be shown, to ignore the primary importance of our human resources to the overall productivity of any organization.

      Yet the management of people is the least taught management skill. There is some growing recognition of this problem, but the required change in the curricula of our business education programs is far too slow. The focus is still on finance, marketing, sales, and the other traditional business courses. The same holds true for the public sector as well, where the emphasis is on such areas as legislation, policy, and public finance.

      The intent of this book is to fill this need in some small measure by providing a simple, straightforward account of what the appropriate and practical people management and organizational skills are to create and sustain a productive workplace, from the time of hiring a new employee through to possible termination and the steps in between. It is true that good managers today must be leaders. Good leaders, however, must understand and ensure productive people management and organizational practices in order to lead.

      The core principles are strong and enduring. With every new client we realize how firmly our practice is based on these principles. When in doubt about how to deal with a certain issue, we only have to refer back to them to help guide both our clients and us. The core principles have never let us down. We have never had to resort to any flavor of the month.

      My thanks to all those scholars, past and present, whose work is reflected and referred to in this book. Thanks also to past employers and all our clients, who have contributed to the practical experience and knowledge that I have attempted to outline in this book. And finally, thanks to my partners for their many years of support, collaboration, good humor, and helpful criticism.

      Dimitri Pojidaeff

      February, 2012

      Chapter 1

      Core Principles

      New developments or flavors of the month?

      If the number of buzzwords is any indication, there have been many supposedly new developments over the past decade or so in the field of Human Resources Management and Organizational Development: Empowerment, Teamwork, Quality Management, Continuous Improvement, Participative Management, Reengineering, Restructuring, and, of course, let’s not forget, Excellence. It is no wonder, therefore, that Peter Senge (1992, pp.30-38), author of The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, had this to say:

      . . . the quality movement . . . risks being fragmented into isolated initiatives and slogans. The voice of the customer, fix the process not the people, competitive benchmarking, continuous improvement, policy deployment, leadership—the more we hear, the less we understand.

      It is not surprising that, for many, it doesn’t add up to much more than management’s latest flavor of the month that must be endured until the next fad comes along.

      So how do we, or can we, make any sense out of all this theory and literature that we’re being inundated with? Does any of it actually work? Is it all just a fad? Where does it all originate? The answer to all these questions is the old French expression, Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

      Intrinsic motivation

      They remain the same, because all of these supposedly new theories primarily involve the core principle of transforming management practices and reforming workplaces so that employees can utilize their own intrinsic motivation to learn, to achieve, to gain esteem, to improve, to look for better ways of doing things and in the process, of course, to improve productivity and maintain consistently high quality and service.

      Three classic motivation theories

      Three classic, traditional theories of human motivation have provided most of the basis of human resource management theory for the past four to five decades:

      1. Abraham Maslow (1987) first described his theory of a hierarchy of needs in his book, Motivation and Personality, which was first published in 1954. That’s 58 years ago! The top of his hierarchy of motivational factors was what he called self-actualization or the desire to become everything that one is capable of becoming; to make the very most of one’s potential. Esteem needs were ranked second. Both self-actualization and esteem, of course, can only be realized in a participative workplace, which fosters intrinsic motivation through empowerment, responsibility, and a real sense of ownership. This is the same principle that underlies all current theories of quality management.

      2. Frederick Herzberg (1966) wrote Work and the Nature of Man in 1966, 46 years ago. In that book he put forth his theory of Maintenance versus Motivation factors and the concept of Job Enrichment. Maintenance factors are extrinsic to the job and include such things as working conditions, salary, and company policies. Motivation factors, on the other hand, are intrinsic to the job, and include such things as achievement, recognition, responsibility, growth, and the work itself.

      Twenty-six years later, Peter Senge (1992, pp.30-38) writes:

      The prevailing system of management has destroyed our people, says Dr. Deming. People are born with intrinsic motivation, self-esteem, dignity, curiosity to learn, joy in learning.

      Intrinsic motivation lies at the heart of Deming’s management philosophy. By contrast, extrinsic motivation is the bread and

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