The future of management: What management skills do employers and employees need to be prepared for the future?
This contribution corresponds to the CQ NetC portal, which defines itself as its foundation being “Evidence-Based Management” and adds that “we work with insights from evidence-based management. Our management trainings, webinars and articles are based on years of social science research, along with the experiences of professionals and the input of their peers.”
WHY EVIDENCE-BASED MANAGEMENT?
Making high-quality decisions is important in personal and professional life. In some situations, making the right or wrong decision has a direct impact on your opportunities, your position, your outlook, and your future. In the late 1990s, the first guidelines on how to make decisions based on the best available evidence emerged in the healthcare sector. Evidence-based approaches also quickly became popular in law enforcement, public administration, and in many areas of management. At CQ Net we believe that management skills are the key to personal and professional success. However, such management skills should be taught according to the best available evidence.
Technology has the potential to amplify human capabilities. However, it is not digital transformation, but business transformation as a whole, that will help drive organizations to achieve top performance in the digital economy.
Technology is a trigger and an engine to rethink processes and business models
Research shows that this is what will constitute true value formation in the VUCA world. This blog post will present the case for why management innovation is at the core of strategic advantage in the era of disruption and offer insight into the management skills needed for the digital age.
The future of management and how to prepare for it
Aleksandra Deric works as a finance professional while studying her PhD. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Finance. After studying at the University of Oxford, she earned her master’s degree from the London School of Economics. Passionate about all things finance, her research interest revolves around FinTech and AI. She likes to write about anything that occupies her curious mind, usually related to finance and business. Her mission is to spread knowledge for the public good and she is committed to making the world a better place through financial education.
Digital transformation is not about technology, but about the people and organizational changes needed to harness its power
What will the future of management be like?
Unprecedented technological changes are disrupting the business landscape, revolutionizing how and what things are done. Change is not only constant but also exponential, both in terms of speed and scope.
These transformations result in:
– a radical change in the business environment
– a new division of labor
– changes in the organizational structure to facilitate the new workflow and support innovation
Changes in the wider environment:
– The emerging trend of the platform economy where technology connects people of all backgrounds and abilities.
– Preparing for the future of management requires the transformation of people and organizations
– The vast, connected and intelligent, technology-based digital world is moving at impressive speed, and business stakeholders will need to quickly and dramatically evolve their leadership skills to lead organizations and people into this future. complex and uncertain.
Digital transformation will soon make the way we work almost unrecognizable to today’s leaders and managers
Perhaps counterintuitively, digital transformation is not about technology, but about the people and organizational changes needed to harness its power.
These are changes in organizational dynamics and how work is done.
Therefore, management capabilities should be at the center of this digitalization. Technology-driven changes in the business environment will drive far-reaching changes in organizational structures, systems, and leadership styles (Weill & Woerner, 2018).
In the digital economy, it may be insufficient to simply modify existing management practices that were once successful.
Reinvent management principles or polish old practices?
Management scholars have argued for almost two decades that new circumstances, such as globalization, global turbulence, technological change, and hypercompetition, demand new organizational models and new theories of management, some of which demand a new management paradigm.
There are two somewhat opposing academic currents that disagree on whether management needs to be completely reinvented or whether it is enough to adapt existing practices to better fit the VUCA world.
Management needs a new paradigm for every aspect of organizational practice
There is a line of research that affirms that current management practices are based on an obsolete management paradigm of the 20th century and that they will be:
– innovation in management, rather than operational innovation
– product innovation.
– strategic innovation
those that will bring the definitive competitive advantage (Hamel, 2007).
This calls for a complete overhaul of management principles and practices and the emergence of an entirely new management paradigm.
Management practices must adapt to better cope with complexity
Other academics are not convinced of the need for a new management paradigm, as they find no evidence that the necessary adaptations require a new paradigm, nor that 21st century management is based on:
– distributed innovation.
– participatory decision making.
This line of research also maintains that the history of management confirmed that most revolutionary initiatives that were based on participatory, committed and democratic management turned out to be failures due to the difficulties in reconciling participation and democracy with efficiency and customer orientation (Grant, 2008).
Instead, they argue that the future of management is more likely to rely on the extension of existing management principles and practices to encompass higher levels of complexity.
These changes will require different leadership styles and decision-making approaches, but not the complete dismantling of existing management practices or their underlying principles (Grant, 2008).
Management skills must adapt to the future
The future of management involves:
– flexibility.
– the adaptation.
– pragmatism.
Whether or not we need a complete reinvention of management principles is open to academic debate. However, what can be said with certainty is that management practices and standards must adapt to the rapidly evolving environment that is spreading into every pore of the economy and society.
Advantages that are difficult to duplicate
Even researchers who argue that management innovations may not amount to a new management paradigm recognize that it is plausible that the idea of management innovation may possess a unique capacity to create advantages that are difficult to duplicate (Grant, 2009).
Birkinshaw, Hamel, and Mol (2009) also posit that management innovation not only enables technological innovation, but is also one of the most important sources of competitive advantage.
Innovation in management means using technology to help transform organizations.
Management innovation refers to the use of technology to find a novel approach to transforming a company’s organizational design, practices and processes.
The result of this is better performance, which is reflected in greater innovation, productivity and competitiveness (Birkinshaw, Hamel and Mol, 2008).
Management innovation explains a substantial degree of variability in firms’ innovative performance, emphasizing that actively stimulating management innovation will be crucial to improving firms’ competitiveness (Volberda, Van Den Bosch & Cornelis, 2013).
Innovation must be rooted in the organizational fabric and culture to be sustainable
However, the extent to which management innovation is a source of sustainable advantages over simply imitating competitors depends on the extent to which it is integrated into the company’s systems and culture.
Management innovations that can be encapsulated within a technique or procedure, such as the balanced scorecard, can be easily imitated (Grant, 2008). Practices and innovations that are spread throughout the company and embedded in the culture cannot be easily imitated.
What differentiates the future of management from current management?
Organizational design is evolving
A recent study conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
It explored what factors business executives identify as the most important differences between the digital and traditional organizational environment (see Kane et al., 2019).
More than 20,000 executives participated in the study: speed of change and creativity were found to top the list
The move away from hierarchical management structures towards flatter structures and the concept of shared or distributed leadership will gain strength as pressure increases for companies to be more agile and innovative.
In fact, organizations that are maturing digitally, or those that are advancing their digital transformation journey, foster distributed leadership and a healthy appetite for experimentation.
The future of management is defined by flat hierarchies, shared competencies and agility.
However, this does not mean that there will be no managers, but that everyone will be managers in some sense. How will that affect organizations? Somewhat counterintuitively, flatter, more democratized self-management systems will not decrease the demand for leadership, but rather increase it.
In the future, organizations will not focus their development efforts solely on a limited number of high-potential employees, but on a broader front of employees. Consequently, management skills will not only be important for CEOs and executives, but for almost all employees in the future.
Management work and management skills are evolving
Technology will challenge managers to reconsider their roles and redefine their operating principles. Research finds that automation will shift the focus from coordination and control to judgment work, such as strategy and innovation, collaboration, people and community, dramatically reducing the time managers spend on coordination and control from more than 50% to 25% (Accenture, 2015).
Hybrid intelligence, the combination of human and artificial intelligence, will play an important role in the future of management. With the new time, interactions and relationships between people are becoming more and more important.
Fostering community, collaboration and interpersonal relationships is vital for innovation
What characterizes a good manager is a complex question, but two themes have stood the test of time since the Ohio State study in the 1950s:
– care for people, or the so-called consideration; and
– care of tasks, called initiating structure.
Interpersonal and judgment skills become vital as technology evolves. Leaders must combine traditional and new skills to effectively guide their organizations into the complex future.
A four-year study conducted by MIT in collaboration with Deloitte
Comparing what companies do right and what they do wrong in digital transformation, he found that what really helps companies stand out in today’s VUCA world is implementing changes on the human side of the business, whether that means a new organizational design , new talent models or adopting new leadership skills (Kane, 2019). Managers must evolve the way they learn and lead in order to adapt and excel.
New leaders must have vision, look to the future and adapt to emerging trends.
In his study, Kane (2017) found that the most important management skill is transformative vision. It encapsulates the ability to predict markets and trends, make optimal trading decisions, and solve difficult problems in turbulent times.
The second most important skill is forward-thinking, which includes having a clear vision, a solid strategy, and foresight. It is the ability to act on observed trends.
Digital literacy is vital as it supports the first two skills and also allows managers to recognize both the benefits and limitations of technology. Adaptability also helps the first two skills.
Of course, most of the skills found by Kane (2017) were desirable even before the disruption.
Transformative vision or vision of the future never hurts a leader
What is new, however, is the need to acquire these skills: while some of them may have been “nice to have” before, they are now “must haves.”
How can employers and employees prepare for the future of management?
One solution is to have ongoing continuing education sessions with the organization’s formal leadership, guided by facilitators with deep digital knowledge.
This can look like something many in Silicon Valley call a “zoom in/out” strategy, where executives imagine what the industry or market will look like in five or ten years and then outline the moves the organization needs to make in the near term. , say 12 to 18 months, to get there.
Other solutions include in-house or online training in specific skills, as well as formal continuing education offered by CQ Net – Management Skills for Everyone! What is also beneficial, and is gaining more and more popularity, is the so-called “intergenerational reverse mentoring program.”
Unlike traditional mentoring, where a senior-level employee mentors a junior-level employee, reverse mentoring means pairing people from different generations, where each of them acts as a mentor and mentee simultaneously. They both learn from each other.
Organizations must invest in people power, flexibility and learning
Technology is changing the way we live and work. The key to thriving under the disruptive forces of digitalization will not be found in algorithms; However, it is very easy to conclude that technology-driven threats are combated with more technology. This is what Kane (2019) calls the technological fallacy.
Technology is a tool, not an objective in itself
It is the driving force behind organizational changes that are changing its design and how things are done. We are moving from a more rigid management, based on the imposition of decisions, mechanistic thinking and control, to a management based on guidance and coaching, empowerment and support, with more spontaneous and flexible structures.
Managers who are equipped with general digital skills and key non-technical skills, such as transformative vision, forward thinking, and decisiveness, will thrive in the digital age along with their organizations. However, let’s not lose sight of the need to equip a broader range of employees with leadership skills, as new, flatter structures will lead to a dispersion of leadership. Leadership will no longer be a matter of a select few, but of all employees.
The future of management
The following contribution corresponds to the “Staffers” portal whose mission is defined as follows: “Our mission is to always have a WIN-WIN-WIN experience for the three components of our business: our job seekers, our clients and staff. We are in business to find jobs for employees and to find employees for companies. Making a difference one job at a time.”
Experts predict that management will change in the coming years. According to Harvard Business Review, many management tasks will be automated and that “up to 65% of the tasks a manager currently performs have the potential to be automated by 2025.”
Additionally, as jobs become remote, the need for management and the type of management have also changed.
What does this mean for managers?
According to HBR, there may be a decline in management positions, but it may also shift managerial tasks toward more relationship-oriented responsibilities.
Therefore, this could mean that managers will need to change their skills and approach to the role. Below are some trends that companies follow in terms of management styles.
- Flattening of organizational structures
A flat organizational structure is one that has very few or no levels of middle management between employees and executives.
In other words, flat organizational structures eliminate some of the most challenging aspects of hierarchical organizational models. According to Statx-Exl, “’flatter’ organizations tend to benefit from better communication between employees, higher morale, less bureaucracy, and the ability to make decisions and changes faster. Typically, employee responsibility levels tend to be much higher in flatter organizations, which improves job satisfaction and reduces the need for excessive levels of management.”
- DEVELOPMENT OF STRONGER MANAGEMENT-EMPLOYEE RELATIONSHIPS.
Many companies will rely on management to foster and strengthen employee relationships with their company. According to Gartner, strong management will assess employees’ strengths and weaknesses and help them take concrete steps to move forward.
Additionally, they will maintain cohesion within the team and defend their employees. Finally, managers will need to find ways to make productivity sustainable to avoid burnout and low retention.
- DECREASE MANAGEMENT IS NOT ALL BAD… EVEN FOR MANAGERS!
According to The Atlantic, “Right now, we basically have only one track (management), and this actively drains talent from an organization by isolating and stifling them in supervisory roles. What we need (and will likely see) is for more organizations to open a different path for people who are very good at their specific job, where these people are compensated for being excellent at what they do and mentoring others.”
Therefore, as Atlantic states, companies are “placing greater value on offering the incentive of promotion to get more out of their workers, at the cost of potentially injecting poor management into their organization.”
The future of management practices
This contribution is by Sarfaraz Muhammad CEO of Hudson Pharma & Innovita Nutritions
The future of management practices is about to undergo significant changes that will be influenced by various technological, social and economic factors.
While it is impossible to predict the precise nature of these changes, they are likely to prioritize key aspects such as sustainability, collaboration, continuous learning and optimal utilization of technology.
Adaptation, ethics and vision of the future
To achieve success in such a rapidly evolving landscape, managers will need to cultivate adaptability, ethical values, and forward-thinking approaches.
Here are some points that I can understand would be vitally important:
– Increased reliance on AI and automation: As AI and automation technology continues to advance, many routine and repetitive management tasks are likely to be handled by machines, freeing up managers to focus on strategic thinking and high-level decision making.
– This could include tasks such as data analysis, programming, and performance monitoring. Artificial intelligence and automation can also be used to improve productivity and efficiency, optimize processes and reduce errors.
There are also concerns about the impact of AI and automation on employment and job security.
Some experts predict that automation could lead to significant job losses, especially in industries that rely heavily on repetitive tasks.
It will be important for managers to consider the ethical implications of using these technologies and ensure that the benefits are shared fairly across the organization.
Increased focus on sustainability: Given growing concerns about climate change and environmental degradation, sustainability is likely to become an even more important consideration in management practices.
This could include a greater emphasis on renewable energy, waste reduction and minimizing carbon emissions.
In addition to being an ethical imperative, sustainability can also be a competitive advantage
Companies that prioritize sustainability may be more attractive to customers, investors, and employees, and may also be better positioned to adapt to future environmental regulations and market conditions.
Virtual and remote management: With the growing popularity of remote work, management practices may change to better accommodate virtual teams and remote workers.
This could include greater use of video conferencing and other communication technologies, as well as more flexible work arrangements.
Virtual and remote management can provide a number of benefits, such as greater flexibility and access to a broader talent pool. However, it also presents unique challenges, such as maintaining team cohesion and ensuring remote workers feel connected to the organization. Managers will need to develop new skills and strategies to effectively manage virtual and remote teams.
Emphasis on continuous learning in a constantly changing world
Management practices are likely to place greater emphasis on continuous learning and skill improvement.
Managers will need to stay up to date with the latest technologies and trends and ensure their teams are also equipped with the necessary skills and knowledge.
Continuous learning can help organizations stay competitive and adapt to changing market conditions. It can also help employees feel more engaged and fulfilled in their work.
Managers’ tasks:
– Managers will need to invest in training and development programs
– Create a culture that supports continuous learning and development.
Collaborative decision making
As organizations become more complex, management practices may shift toward more collaborative decision-making processes.
This could involve greater input from a broader range of stakeholders, including employees, customers and community members.
Collaborative decision making can help generate more diverse and innovative ideas, improve decision acceptance and support, and improve accountability and transparency. However, it can also be time-consuming and require additional resources to manage. Managers will need to balance the benefits of collaborative decision making with the practical realities of running an organization.
Questions that arise and that you should take into account
– What technological, social and economic factors will shape the future of management practices?
– How will management practices prioritize sustainability, collaboration, continuous learning and effective use of technology in the next 10 to 20 years?
– What skills will managers need to possess to succeed in the rapidly evolving landscape of the future?
The future of management
Danah Zohar is a visiting professor at Tsinghua SEM and the Chinese Academy of Art, and the creator of quantum management theory. She is the author of The Quantum Leader and the recently published Zero Distance: The Tao of Quantum Management.
She founder and author of “Quantum Leadership and Management”, member of “Thinkers50 Hall of Fame 2022”, consultant, speaker, mentor and visiting professor School of Chinese Academy of Art I MIT I Harvard.
The management model used by most large and many smaller organizations was conceived by Frederick Taylor in the 19th century to meet the needs of the Industrial Revolution. The world in which companies operated at that time was very different from that of the 21st century.
Greater stability in the past
Things were more stable and simpler, change was slow and seemed predictable, markets and supply chains were more local and isolated, communication much slower and restricted, employee expectations were lower, and technology was almost totally machine based.
Complexity, chaos and rapid change
Today, business leaders struggle to thrive in a complex, unstable and uncertain, often chaotic world characterized by rapid change and constant innovation, and globally interconnected. Communication is instantaneous and quantum physics has given rise to new digital technologies, new materials and new manufacturing processes.
Leaders must deal with an environmental crisis and employees who are often better educated
They all have different interests and the situation is that they seek different returns from their work and they may come from a variety of backgrounds and cultures.
Employee attitudes toward authority and personal empowerment are changing, and customer expectations are also more varied and demanding.
Many feel that Taylorism no longer meets business needs and call for a new management model
What would such a new model be like?
To understand the future of management, we must better understand what it was thought to be like.
– On what assumptions were our past notions of management based?
– What did they take for granted about the nature of the world, the nature of the organization, and the nature of the people who lead and work in organizations?
Organizations are a giant gear
Taylor’s model, the basis of all modern management theory, was inspired and his organizational model was inspired by the ideas and principles that defined Newtonian physics of the 17th century.
Just as Newton saw the universe as a giant machine, Taylor urged that the organization should function as a well-oiled machine, divided into “separate atomistic divisions,” controlled from above and organized with well-defined bureaucratic rules.
Taylor himself was a mechanical engineer. Writing in the industrial age of the 18th century, Taylor’s more general worldview, and that of most Westerners of the time, was a worldview shaped by the assumptions of Newtonian physics: the universe was mechanistic. , simple, law-abiding (deterministic) and predictable; Human beings were unique and completely separate from both Nature and the cosmos; Human beings were privileged and Nature was a resource for our exploitation.
Just as the cosmos was structured hierarchically, human beings were naturally classified in a hierarchy of potentials, roles and functions, and the higher was to govern the lower. All of these became assumptions incorporated into the management of a Taylorist company.
But Newtonian physics was displaced in the early 20th century by quantum physics, a theory of how the universe works and what it is made of.
Entangled energy quanta replaced Newton’s isolated, material atoms. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle replaced Newtonian determinism. Simplicity and stability were replaced by complexity and constant, dynamic change.
The separation of the human observer was replaced by a participatory universe in which the observer and the observed were a co-creative unit.
After all, human beings were not separate from nature and the universe. Instead, our questions, our observations, and our experiments play an active role in creating the world, something we now realize very clearly from our destructive role in climate change.
And subsequent discoveries from the offspring of quantum science, complexity science, have shown that we humans are living quantum systems (“complex adaptive systems”), made of the same matter (energy) that we Everything else in the universe and our “matter” is made up, organized and acting according to the same principles as all life on earth, both plants and animals.
I have spent my life arguing that quantum physics therefore gives rise to a new view of the world.
A paradigm in which human beings are fully part of nature and the cosmos and responsible to and for them, in which we realize that everything is a part. of everything and therefore there is no distance, no separation, no “others”.
The cosmos, nature and humanity are parts of a living, dynamic, constantly changing and self-organizing system.
There is no hierarchy, no “little” or “inferior” people, but rather a world in which everything and everyone has infinite potential, everything and everyone plays a creative role in the complex and dynamic development of the universe.
And I believe that this new physics and its new vision of the world provide us with a new paradigm for managing organizations.
I have called it Quantum Management Theory
It changes the way we view the organization and even our way of thinking about the nature of work itself. I think it portrays the future of management.
Quantum Management is inspired by quantum physics and complexity science, and the basic principles by which all quantum systems, including living ones, are organized.
Proposes that the organization is best understood as a living and conscious system
Living quantum systems (all organic life, including ourselves) are called “Complex Adaptive Systems” (CAD).
Companies viewed as such systems are holistic, constantly evolving and redefining themselves through co-creative dialogue between the company’s employees and its customers and between the company and the broader external environment: other companies, society, the planet.
CADs are also self-organizing, and any imposition of control from outside or “from above” alienates the constituent parts and destroys the creativity of the system.
Quantum management theory calls for non-directive, non-interventionist leadership and the elimination of stifling bureaucracy
It also calls for the elimination of hierarchy and the formation of small, self-organized, cross-functional teams in which all employees can reach their full potential.
A dynamic systems structure
And finally, because Quantum Management deals with human systems, a necessary part of the theory holds that the purposes, values, aspirations and motivations of the people working in an organization, and the emerging organizational culture, must be seen as part of its structure. dynamic systems.
Defining Quantum Management Principles
Self-organization: Complex adaptive systems (CAD) form themselves according to their own internal logic and then evolve in a self-organized and adaptive manner that ensures both survival (sustainability) and growth or creativity.
Each element of the system is “in tune” with all other elements and constantly adapts to both the internal changes and needs of the system and the external factors of the environment, such as temperature, available sunlight, and available resources.
These organic CADs encompass all the basic design principles of quantum physics itself and are, for all practical purposes, living quantum systems.
If such systems are subject to any type of external control, the constituent elements of the system become “alienated” from each other and the system loses its own capacity for self-organization.
Then he gets sick and usually dies. There is no bureaucracy in Nature, no top-down control.
– Holistic, Systemic: In the quantum universe, everything is connected to everything, “entangled” with everything, and a principle of Zero Distance applies in each quantum system and in the cosmic quantum system as a whole.
Quantum companies thus have a kind of systemic intelligence. The internal system comprises all the people who work in the company, their skills, knowledge and intelligence, and their potential for constant adaptation, discovery, creativity and growth.
And any business system is also part of and integrated into larger external systems:
-customer satisfaction and loyalty.
– the health and stability of society.
– indeed, the health and stability of the entire global community.
– the vagaries of climate change.
– population migration patterns and regulations.
– and the need for a certain degree of cooperation even with competitors.
All of these above points have a direct impact on the viability and success of a company. Therefore, each quantum company is an ecosystem with both internal and external characteristics.
- Relationships Matter (Contextualism): The quantum universe is not a universe of cause and effect, but rather a universe created and governed by relationships. If strategists at a quantum company have a desired outcome or goal, they ask, “What relationships do we need to build to achieve it?”
In today’s interconnected and interdependent world, close, cooperative, win-win relationships are necessary for system success, both internally and externally. Therefore, Quantum Management calls on companies to get rid of borders and boundaries (isolated departments and functions).
They will have infrastructures and a culture that foster and build relationships (between leaders and employees, between employees and their colleagues, between divisions and functional groups, and between the organization and its broader ecosystem: customers, the community, society as a whole, etc.). the natural environment.
Experiment! (Heisenberg’s ‘Ask Questions’): All of science itself is driven by the activities of incessantly asking questions and then seeking answers to these questions through constant experiments. In quantum physics, questions create their own answers.
Each question draws a new reality from the realm of underlying quantum potentiality. Companies that encourage questions enjoy creativity and innovation, foresee a wide range of possible strategies, and make better decisions.
Quantum companies create multiple teams or self-organizing units, each empowered to conduct their own questions and experiments.
They function more like a jazz jam-session, with infrastructures and a culture that allow the free play of uncertainty and experimentation, where different questions can be asked, different objectives, products and functions considered.
Roles are less fixed, employees are encouraged to play “different instruments”, take risks and experiment with the “score”. The quantum leader sees himself as holding the space where the underlying theme can emerge.
– Both/And: All quantum systems are wave and particle at the same time. Each one is intertwined with all the others and, at the same time, each one has an individual identity that is a point source of action. Quantum companies are also in the form of waves and particles.
Each of the self-organizing particle teams makes their own decisions, formulates their own strategies and engages directly with their own customers, while a strong, clearly defined wave-shaped central operating system provides vision, values and objectives. common. goals, benchmarks and KPIs that unite the activities of self-organizing teams into a holistic system.
The wavy aspect of individual self-organized teams also manifests itself in their cooperation and co-creation with other members of the business ecosystem.
– A sense of purpose: The quantum universe has a clear sense of direction.
By constantly creating new relationships between constituent elements, it is always creating new order and new information, always enriching itself and realizing new potentialities.
CADs also have a clear sense of direction. They want to sustain themselves while constantly evolving or growing.
The Quantum Management equivalent of this drive toward growth is found in a company’s sense of purpose.
– Why does this company exist?
-What is this company for?
– Who or what is it for?
Companies that have a clearly defined sense of purpose that answers such questions have integrity and meaning and their employees are engaged and positively motivated, making them more productive.
– A quantum organization will be agile, responsive and adaptable. Complex quantum adaptive systems are indeterminate, or at least unpredictable. They are located on the border between order and chaos, between reality and potentiality, and their indeterminacy makes them flexible, receptive to their environments and prepared to evolve in any direction.
Quantum businesses must be able to adapt and respond to the rapid changes and uncertainty of today’s business world. Their infrastructures must look less like Meccano or Lego and more like plasticine, capable of taking any shape and modifying at will.
Subdivided into self-organized teams, each with its own “brain”, your products and services will be more widespread and constantly innovative and therefore more receptive to the market. Experimental failures can be tolerated and risk spread.
– A quantum organization will be ecological and ecosystemic. The Earth’s environment is in danger. Quantum companies know that they are both in nature and of nature, co-creative partners in the Earth’s ecosystem, both dependent and protective.
They safeguard the natural order by dedicating research time to innovating greener products for the market, and doing so using green manufacturing techniques. Quantum companies are also in the community and of the community, and are dedicated to creating value for customers and the community.
Quantum management in China
Quantum physics was discovered by Western scientists, but they never really understood it. The nature of quantum reality and the new worldview that emerges from it are foreign to the Western mind.
But the quantum nature of reality and the basic ideas that emerge from the quantum worldview are very familiar to China.
They date back to the codification of the I Ching and Lao Tzu’s Taoist thought, underpin the moral vision of Confucianism, and are even reflected in much of the CCP’s thought.
China has been “quantum” for more than 3,000 years. Therefore, it is not surprising that the first implementation of the Quantum Management paradigm was in China, and that many Chinese companies today are adopting its principles and organizational structures. Below I briefly describe three.
Haier Rendanheyi model:
Haier was the world’s first major global company to pioneer the implementation of Quantum Management, and its revolutionary RenDanHeyi business model was the first to present this theory in the form of a practical business model. RenDanHeyi gives us the opportunity to see all the features of Quantum Management in practice.
When he was young, Haier CEO Zhang Ruimin worked in a rural factory. He and his young coworkers tried to suggest ways the factory could be improved, but his boss responded, “You don’t get paid to think.
“Just get to work and do what you’re told.” Zhang promised that one day he would found a company where people could think. Giving all employees maximum autonomy to develop their own potential is a pillar of Haier’s vision and purpose.
The other is to guarantee its customers high quality, personalized service and maximum freedom of choice with minimum difficulty. The company motto is: “At Haier, everyone is a CEO and the customer is the boss.”
In 2005, Zhang began implementing his RenDanHeyi transformation and its driving principle of Zero Distance. All traces of bureaucracy were eliminated, freeing the company from middle management and the entire tortuous decision-making process in the chain of command.
Zhang himself handed over all power, seeing his CEO role as providing inspiration and facilitating the needs of employees. Employees were divided into small, independent, multifunctional, self-organized microenterprises (MEs) of three to twenty people, and middle managers who wanted to remain with the company became CEOs of these.
Employees, and even people outside of Haier, were allowed to submit offers to form additional MEs and today there are 4,000 customer-facing MEs in the Haier ecosystem.
Each designs its own products, finds and interacts closely with its own customers in co-creative relationships, determines its own hiring and compensation policy, and derives its benefits directly from customers.
Each is a company in its own right and, therefore, its members are true entrepreneurs.
Customer-facing MEs have the flexibility and independence of small startups, but receive the supply and service benefits of being part of a large enterprise through service platforms that operate as independent, self-organizing MEs.
All MEs are free to trade with each other in an internal market or to supply their needs from external suppliers.
In recent years, Haier introduced “scenarios”, groups of products that are sold as a unit to meet multiple customer needs in a single transaction, and in 2019 the company introduced its “ecosystem scenarios” policy in which several Haier ME forms temporary contracts with each other and/or with external companies to provide increasingly inclusive scenario solutions to customers.
The entire company is now a vast industrial ecosystem, a company of companies comprising an interactive internal ecosystem that is itself part of a large, interactive external ecosystem of associated companies.
Everything is connected to everything. This Zero Distance model has allowed Haier, once a home appliance company, to expand into healthcare, medical supplies, clothing, agriculture, real estate, food and finance, simultaneously turning potentialities into new realities in all directions, sustaining and reinventing itself. and growing, like a living system in evolution, a CAD. Today, Haier subsidiaries in Europe, America and Japan have also implemented the Rendanheyi Quantum Management model, and Fujitsu has recently done so.
Before 2008, HStyle was a typical online clothing and service provider on Taobao. Its pivot from product sales to brand operation occurred in 2008. Its adoption of the Quantum Management paradigm differentiated HStyle from traditional major players like Uniqlo, Only, Zara, etc.
HStyle reformed its internal business model to train employees to better meet user demands. and customers through rapid iteration and rapid response.
The company originally created a “group system”, a full-process item management system. This system inverted the traditional management hierarchy, giving decision-making power to employees, who became managers in their own right, even “entrepreneurs,” and the company’s focus was now on the needs of customers.
The most recently adopted business model was the S2B model, which linked large service platforms to brands, thus giving self-organized business groups a much greater ability to meet a variety of customer needs.
Therefore, a new business model of “product and employee empowerment” with “big platform + small interface” was established.
Ultimately, this enabled cloud incubation of their brands and micro-businesses, enabling Quantum Management features of “host-guest interaction and co-evolution” and “continuous generation and emergence.”
Based on cloud incubation and micro-businesses, HStyle established an intrapreneur operating model and platform ecosystem. In 2016, the company ran a new business incubator “Government Enterprise Association” in joint efforts with the government, and conducted green incubation and internal business incubation. As a result, HStyle has more than 200 brands under its operation, including private labels, joint venture brands and others that it operates and services as an agent.
Tianneng:
Focused on manufacturing environmentally friendly electric batteries for electric vehicles, Tianneng is a large corporation that combines the research and development, production and sales of lithium batteries for alternative energy vehicles, automatic start-stop batteries for automobiles and energy storage batteries for solar and wind energy. force. Its revenue surpassed the 100 billion RMB mark in 2019. Tianneng, ranked 30th among the top 500 Chinese private companies, has become one of the industrial leaders of alternative energy batteries in China.
Tianneng started as a small factory run by a village. Following its success in the field of lead-acid batteries, Tianneng mastered the core technologies in the lithium battery area one after another and owned more than 2,000 state-licensed patents. As it grew, the company gradually recognized the importance of independent innovation. Thus, in addition to its emphasis on technological innovation, Tianneng officially launched its innovation in organization and management modes in 2014 by creating “autonomous units” empowered to make their own R&D decisions and deal directly with customers.
This fits with the “host-guest interactions” and “coevolution” theories of the Quantum Management paradigm. The company’s management organization changed from a traditional pyramid-style architecture to a platform-style company. The inverted triangle structure placed all autonomous BU modules at the top level, while corporate functional departments were now at the bottom level, to integrate resources, support and serve BU modules, and realize organizational management transformation. platform style.
The creation of “autonomous units” turned employees into owners through independent self-management, thus changing the role of employees from “workers who passively execute” to “managers who proactively create.” The “autonomous unit” opened a new path for internal entrepreneurship in Tianneng, making all-hands-on-deck management a reality. On the basis of internal entrepreneurship and competition, the business value-added potential has been tapped. Based on an “employee-independent accounting” system, the internal competition operating mechanism has also increased the company’s competitiveness in external markets.
What is the future of management like?
This contribution corresponds to Shonna Waters who is the vice president of executive advice at BetterUp. She leads the development of evidence-based solutions to address her clients’ key business challenges and drive optimal performance and well-being for all members.
Shonna began her career as an internal and external consultant across sectors and industries on topics spanning all aspects of people systems in organizations, including recruitment, development, leadership and succession, performance management, governance and compensation.
Prior to joining BetterUp, she held executive leadership positions at the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) and the National Security Agency. Shonna is a professor, author, leadership coach, and member of the Society for Industrial Organizational Psychology (SIOP) and the Center for Evidence-Based Management (CeBMA).
Shonna received her Ph.D. in Industrial-Organizational (I-O) Psychology and Statistics from the University of Minnesota. She completed her certificate in Leadership Coaching from Georgetown University’s Leadership Coaching Program and is an ICF certified coach.
Some of the contents of this article:
– Proof that managers or the tendency towards holacracy.
– The dynamic organizational chart: distributed leadership and agile teams
– The future of leadership development in a distributed future
When Elon Musk sent an email to Tesla employees warning against the delaying effect of managers acting as “middlemen” in communication processes, it resonated.
For some it was a validation of the argument that managers are inherently bad for organizations.
This model of management by control has inspired many films, comedies and cartoons. Whether it’s Boss Bill Lumberg asking about the memo in Office Space or the Pointy Haired Boss (PHB) from the Dilbert cartoons, we can all relate to these nightmarish cartoons. So why do we still have them?
It’s hard to argue that the pace of business is the same as it was even a decade ago.
When decisions are relegated
Some traditional conceptualizations of leadership and management relegate decision making, particularly strategic decisions, to the top of the organization.
Individuals further down the chain can be left largely in the dark and left to execute decisions made earlier as instructed.
Although one could argue that the model was always limited, the era of the “choiceless doer” may be behind us. It’s hard to argue that the pace of business is the same as it was even a decade ago. If Musk is right and managers are simply slowing things down, perhaps managers have outlived their usefulness in organizations.
Reflect for a moment on your own experience with managers.
Who was your PHB? Without a doubt, you have probably experienced the dark side of management. It is not surprising then that some have decided to eliminate them completely or have questioned whether they add any value.
Several organizations and organizational theorists have suggested that organizations would be better off without managers.
Bill Gore described the reticular organization, but similar concepts include holacracy and teal organizations. All of these paradigms have in common a restructuring of work towards less hierarchical and more democratized systems of organization or self-management.
Would management cease to exist if we eliminated managers?
Proof that managers (or management) matter
Google previously experimented with self-managed teams (which, as they describe, didn’t go well) and conducted a study to prove that managers don’t matter.
In the end, Google found what others had shown: Managers do matter.
They can matter for better or worse. They developed a list of eight management behaviors that the best managers adopt. They then set out to help develop better managers by focusing on those behaviors.
Ohio State Studies
Research from the 1950s, known as the Ohio State Studies, identified consideration and initial structure as the building blocks of leader effectiveness, a strong finding verified over time.
Consideration of others
Consideration is the degree to which the leader’s behaviors show concern and respect for followers, look out for their well-being, and express appreciation and support (Bass and Stogdill, 1990).
Initial structure is the degree to which leaders define and organize their role and that of their followers, orient themselves toward goal achievement, and establish well-defined patterns and channels of communication (Fleishman, 1962; Fleishman and Hunt, 1973).
These two themes (care of people and care of tasks) appear again and again. Decades later, John Campbell and his colleagues proposed a performance model applicable to all jobs.
Campbell investigations
In 2012, Campbell conducted a comprehensive review of performance research and practice over nearly three decades and identified 14 factors (6 leadership and 8 management) that can be used in selection, training, and development. , job design and performance evaluation of leaders at all organizational levels. – including peer leadership. In that sense, leadership and managerial performance exist regardless of the structure.
Lead with confidence and authenticity
– Develop your leadership and strategic management skills with the help of an expert Coach.
– Find your trainer
– The trend towards holacracy
Best-selling author and business school professor David Burkus aptly named a chapter in his book Under New Management, “Fire the Managers.” Some companies have done just that, which can offer excellent case studies to evaluate the impact of eliminating managers.
Zappos sparked a media frenzy by experimenting with holacracy
It should be noted that holacracy is an organizational system in which authority and decision-making are decentralized rather than established by a management hierarchy.
In a 2016 article, they describe going from 150 managers to 350 “top liaisons.” Their message is that this more distributed model allows for more freedom and autonomy.
However, as Harvard Business School professor Ethan Bernstein stated: “You can’t take a person and put a job description on them and say this person is a manager. But there is a lot of management going on, in fact, perhaps management is even more important in an organization with a work chart, as opposed to an organizational chart, because there is more to manage.” Going a step further, Burkus states that “no manager” means “everyone is a manager.”
To be fair, Lead Links represent fluid roles rather than static jobs
To that point, one could argue that what these three cases show is that there are valuable management and leadership functions that are performed, and even should be performed, regardless of the structure. Managers do more than just slow down communication. He attends to both the needs of people and the tasks for which he is responsible.
The dynamic organizational chart: distributed leadership and agile teams
Valve Software was one of the first to visibly adopt the managerless organization. Valve reasoned that they hire smart, innovative, and talented people; To thrive, they can’t have people telling them what to do. They can propose and lead projects, track and organize their peers’ work on projects.
They also evaluate their teammates and provide feedback, contribute to compensation setting, and participate in hiring. But all of those tasks are a lot like management.
These dynamic, self-managed, cross-functional teams are becoming increasingly popular
They have long been common in certain sectors, such as consulting, or in future-oriented organizations within traditional sectors, such as General Electric’s aircraft engine assembly facility in Durham, North Carolina.
We still have more to learn about how to optimize self-managed teams
But there certainly can be positive benefits for both team members and the bottom line.
The move away from hierarchical management structures is likely to spread as pressure increases for organizations to be more agile and creative.
This measure is unlikely to eliminate the demand for management capacity. In fact, in the era of shared or distributed leadership, we may not have the luxury of focusing development efforts on a small number of high-potential people.
The demand for the ability to manage, and even lead, is increasing. In this new era, how can we ensure that the core of the organization has the capacity to take care not only of its own tasks, but also those of others?
Google’s behaviors
Most of the eight Google behaviors that good managers adopt have more to do with people than tasks.
Traditional training is best when the goal is to increase knowledge. But it is not adequate to achieve significant and sustained improvements in a person’s internal resources and social skills that relate to behaviors such as expressing concerns for teammates or empowering others. This is where coaching shines.
The future of leadership development in a distributed future
With or without them, management and leadership demands will persist.
So are organizations better off without managers? With or without them, management and leadership demands will persist. The dark side of management is real and traditional leadership development has not been enough.
We need new models to strengthen our ability to develop leadership and management capacity, at scale. Changing the management mindset from control to empowerment and support will not be easy, but it may be a more fruitful path than trying to free organizations from management.
Management in the future
This contribution corresponds to the “CliffsNotes” portal that covers a number of topics on Management.
A brief history
CliffsNotes is the original (and most imitated) study guide. CliffsNotes study guides are written by real teachers and professors, so no matter what you’re studying, CliffsNotes can relieve your homework headaches and help you get high grades on tests.
Modern management approaches respect classical, human resources and quantitative management approaches. However, successful managers recognize that although each theoretical school has limitations in its applications, each approach also offers valuable insights that can expand a manager’s options for solving problems and achieving organizational goals.
Successful managers work to expand these approaches to meet the demands of a dynamic environment.
Modern management approaches recognize that people are complex and variable.
Employee needs change over time; People have a variety of talents and abilities that can be developed. Therefore, organizations and managers must respond to people with a wide variety of management strategies and career opportunities.
Key issues to consider as the 21st century progresses include the following:
– The commitment to meeting customer needs 100 percent of the time guides organizations toward quality management and continuous improvement of operations.
– Today’s global economy has a dramatic influence on organizations and opportunities abound to learn new forms of management from practices in other countries.
– Organizations must reinvest in their most important asset: their people. If organizations cannot commit to lifetime employment, they must commit to using attrition to reduce employee numbers. They will not receive cooperation unless they make it clear that their people will not be left without jobs.
Managers must excel in their leadership responsibilities to perform numerous different roles.
Classical management thinkers proceed as follows:
– use the “it all depends” approach.
– use quantitative tools for decision making.
– They look for the best way to do something.
They know that their most important and complex resource is people
Hawthorne’s studies are an important basis for the approaches; they were a wake-up call about the importance of recognition and human relationships at a time when classical theory (rigid, authoritarian and dehumanized) reigned in the business world.
Until then, it was believed that aspects such as specialization or salary incentives were sufficient to explain and achieve increases in labor productivity.
It was found that management’s trust was capable of motivating employees in a more powerful and effective way.