There was a programme in the “In Business” series on Radio 4 recently.
The programme, through the words of the Gurus of the last century, confirmed the basis of our disquiet with the conventional command and control model of management.
All of the voices talked about releasing the ingenuity and creativity of the workforce through autonomy.
Peter Drucker said, “Everybody says that People are our most important asset”, then they go ahead and sack them anyway.”
He said that he had been preaching the same message for the last 50 or 60 years, that “Human beings are the resource and not the cost”, but that in all that time, all of his preaching has had almost no impact.
A reason for this could be that the managers who understood exactly the value of Peters words had no idea what to do with those words to make a practical difference to the effectiveness of their workforce.
The Soft Skills that show the manager how to allow the workforce to work to their full potential, to become as good as they can be, are not a part of the syllabus that we use to train managers.
Managers are trained to manage process.
Why are we surprised when they fail to manage people?
Peter
Peter Hunter
